Los fraudes del Humanismo. Ciceron, Maquiavelo y al Retóricade la Impostura. 2004.pdf

8/13/2019 Los fraudes del Humanismo. Ciceron, Maquiavelo y al Retricade la Impostura. 2004.pdf

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Michelle Zerba

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Rhetorica, Vol. XXII, Issue 3, pp. 215240, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 1533-8541. 2004 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rightsreserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

The Frauds of Humanism: Cicero, Machiavelli,and the Rhetoric of Imposture

Abstract:Machiavellis advocacy of force and fraud in the conduct

of politics is the key teaching that has secured his reputation as

Machiavellian and that has led to the conception ofThe Princeas the first document in the Western tradition to lay bare the dark,

demonic underside of civic humanism. But this interpretation over-

looks the degree to which a politics of intense competition and per-

sonal rivalry inhabits the humanist vision from antiquity, produc-

ing an ethics of expediency and a rhetoric of imposture that seeks

to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise of integrity

and service. This vision is nowhere more apparent than in Ciceros

De Oratore, which exerted a powerful influence on the Italian hu-

manists of the quattrocentro in whose direct descent Machiavellistands. Deception, to put it simply, is an acknowledged and vital

element in civic humanism long before The Prince. The difference

is that Cicero typically couches it in a sacrificial rhetoric that is

euphemistically inflected while Machiavelli opts for a hard-edged

rhetoric of administrative efficiency to make his case. But the stylis-

tic differences, important as they are, should not mask the essential

affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and

the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.

A prince must know how to make good use of both the beast and theman. Ancient writers made subtle note of this fact when they wrotethat Achilles and many other princes of antiquity were sent to be reared

by Chiron the centaur, who trained them in this discipline. Having ateacher who is half man and half beast can only mean that a prince mustknow how to use both of these two natures, and that one without theother has no lasting effect.

Machiavelli,The Prince(Chapter 18)

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R H E T O R I C A216

This passage, which occurs in the most maligned and crit-ically disputed chapter of The Prince, embodies one of

Machiavellis hard teachings. We are half-beast, he says,and a ruler must act in accordance with that fact, picking for imitationthe fox and the lion, one an exemplar of cunning, the other of force.Those who try to live by the lion alone are badly mistaken. Forcerarely suffices in the exercise of power, whereas cunning often does.1

Thus a prudent prince cannot and should not keep his word whento do so would go against him or when the reasons that made himpledge it no longer apply. He must appear to, however; he mustput up a good show of being honest while conducting himself de-

ceitfully. This is one example among others of Machiavellis rejectingthe idealism of political utopias forla veritaeffettuale della cosa, theeffective truth of the matter (Chapter 15): to rule well, a prince mustlearn how not to be good. What motivates this endorsement of fraud?[Human beings] are a sad lot, and keep no faith with you; you inyour turn are under no obligation to keep it with them.

Here are the outlines of the murderous Machiavel who stalkedthe Renaissance stage, a diabolic manipulator prepared to cheat, lie,and kill to secure his ends. Iago is his most familiar name.2 Popular

as the stereotype has remained over the centuries, it has generated,by way of reaction, a nearly contrary image of the Florentine as thepassionate defender of free states and civic liberty.3 Wing-clipped and

1I have used the Latin text ofDe Oratore by K.F. Kumaniecki (M. Tulli Ciceroniscripta quae manserunt omnia, Fasc. 3, De Oratore [Stuttgart, 1995]). For De Officiis,I have used the text by C. Atzert in the same Teubner series, Fasc. 48, 1914. Alltranslations from Latin are my own. For Machiavelli, I have used Opere, ed. EzioRaimondi. 5th ed. Milan. 1971. Translations ofThe 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.

SeeDiscourses2.13 for a fuller statement of this view in the context of the Romanstate. 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 ofconcern to one who commands. But the rhetorical dimension of this assertiontheimportance of a prince controlling praise or blame in the pursuit of waris integral tothe chapter; seeDiscourses1.10.

2J.A. Mazzeo,Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1964), 15758, treatsthis view as oneof the dominant myths of Machi-avelli. For other discussions of the Elizabethan Machiavelli, see M. Praz, Machiavelli

and the Elizabethans,Proceedings of the British Academy13 (1928): 4997 and F. Raab,The English Face of Machiavelli(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).

3An influential book in this vein is J. G. A. Pocock,The Machiavellian Moment:Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1975). For an earlier treatment, see Z. Fink, The Classical Republicans.



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The Frauds of Humanism 217

sanitized, this Machiavelli of republican ideals is a bird that has beentrained to navigate low flight patterns over terrain everyone finds

familiar and unthreatening. He is one of the classical republicans,a bit scruffier than the rest, but respectable all the same, and whenhe advocates force or fraud, he does so with anguish. For the betterpart of the last century, this tamed Machiavelli has been the oneto hold the stage. It is no wonder, then, that the current swing ofthe pendulum has critics reviving the bad-boy of the Elizabethans.4

Integral to this revival has been the image of the red-robed Florentinechancellor as anagent provocateurwho tended foreign affairs by dayand by night devised subversive techniques for turning humanism

against itself.5

If recent discussion has revived debate about Machiavellis hu-manism, it has also brought back interest in a related question. Doesthe teaching about fraud set out in Chapter 18 ofThe Prince constitutethe scandalous break from the classical tradition that critics have typ-ically claimed it has? In articulating it, is Machiavelli departing fromthe precepts of others, or does the example of Chiron the centaurconfirm an ancient commitment to educating leaders-to-be on boththe rational and bestial sides of their nature?6 An adequate response

must be framed in terms of important classical texts that have beenconsistently overlooked in the discussion. This includes works bythe Roman author from whom Machiavelli in all likelihood drew thesimile of the lion and the fox: Cicero.7

Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945). For a discussion of the problemsposed by the history of republican readings of Machiavelli, see V. Kahn,MachiavellianRhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1994), 1643. She also shows how versions of the two opposed readings to which I

refer circulated from the timeThe Princewas first published in 1532.4A clarion call to radicalizing the republican Machiavelli came from M. Hal-

liung,Citizen Machiavelli(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).5See the theses of L. P. S. de Alvarez,The Machiavellian Enterprise: A Commentary

on the Prince (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999); Kahn,MachiavellianRhetoric, cited in n. 3 above; and M. McCanles,The Discourse of Il Principe, inHumanaCivilitas: Studies and Sources Relating to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 8 (Malibu:Undena Publications, 1983).

6There is no known analogue in classical literature for Machiavellis allegori-cal interpretation of Chiron. Recent discussions have focused on how Machiavellisdoctrine 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. 75100;H. Mansfield,Machiavellis Virtue(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3738;and Kahn,Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 443.

7De Officiis1.13.41 may be the locus classicusfor the simile inThe Prince, thoughMachiavelli, in keeping with a tendency of Renaissance critics not to cite their sources,



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It is Cicero, of course, who largely shaped the humanist traditioninherited by the cinquecento.8 Two interrelated concepts central to

this tradition are relevant to the problem we are examining. Onepresents human beings as having progressed beyond the conditionof beasts when they congregated in communities guided by theexercise of reason and the rule of justice.9 The other idealizes theprimal founders of these communities as morally good men skilledin speaking who exemplify the cooperative, peacekeeping virtuesof wisdom, justice, temperance, and liberality.10 Set forth in Book 1of CicerosDe Officiis, these four so-called cardinal virtues remainedcentral to the assimilation of pagan moral ideas in the Latin West from

does not mention Cicero. None of Machiavellis letters, so far as I know, casts light onthe question, though Machiavellis father had a copy De Officiisin his private library.

8On Machiavellis humanist education, in particular, see Mansfield,MachiavellisVirtue, cited in n. 6 above, pp. 3136; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 1517; S. deGrazia, Sebastian, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989),328; Q. Skinner, Machiavelli (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 45; J.H. Geercken,Machiavelli Studies Since 1969, Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 35254; F.Gilbert,Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 31822; and Mazzeo, Renaissance and

Seventeenth-Century Studies, cited in n. 2 above, pp. 12432. D. Marsh, The Quattrocen-tro Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980), shows how influential CicerosDe Oratorewas on Florentinehumanists from Leonardo Bruni to Giovanni Pontano. A complete text of the dialogue,which circulated in fragmentary versions during the Middle Ages, was discovered inLodi in 1421.

9See, for example, Isocrates,Antidosis 2.74; Aristotle,Politics 1.2; Dante, Inferno11.24; and Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologica2.1.31.7; 90.1. The progressivist viewof human enlightenment coexists in the Middle Ages with the pessimistic Augustinianview. 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. 128 and 14548.

10On this tradition see G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secu-lar Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1999), 196240; M. L. Clarke,Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey, rev.ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 5061; Gilbert,Machiavelli and Guicciardini, cited in n. 8above, pp. 88104; F. Gilbert, The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Princeof Machiavelli, The Journal of Modern History 11 (1939): 44983; and A. H. Gilbert,

Machiavellis Prince and Its Forerunners (Durham: Duke University Press, 1938), 318.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), 282307, for a succinct summary of the normative clas-sical view of civic harmony against which Machiavelli was reacting. For a fulleranalysis of Ciceros social and political thought and, in particular, of his ideal gentle-man/statesman, see N. Wood, Ciceros Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1988), 7089, 100104, 178.



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Lactantius to Dante and formed the core of the mirror-for-magistratesliterature with its paradigm of the archetypal prince.11 Those who

argue that Machiavelli rebelled against this interpretation of rulinghave compelling reasons to do so; he frequently invoked it in orderto reject its premises and conclusions.12

But the case for Machiavellis anti-humanism has too often over-valued the idealist strain of the tradition with its emphasis on har-mony and consensus in human communities. In the process, an im-portant fact has been overlooked: a politics of intense competitionand personal rivalry has inhabited the humanist vision from antiq-uity, producing an ethics of expediency and a pantomimic morality,

which seeks to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise ofintegrity and service.13 Critics have already observed the role ofDeOfficiis,with its adjustments of the standard of truth to the standardof utility, in shaping the Renaissance concept of an agonistic and

11See A. R. Dyck,A Commentary on Ciceros De Officiis(Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1996), 88101; J. T. Muckle, The Influence of Cicero in the Formationof Christian Culture, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 42 (1948): 10725;

and N.E. Nelson, Ciceros De Officiisin Christian Thought: 3001300, inEssays andStudies in English and Comparative Literature, 10 (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1933), 59160.

12A. H. Gilbert inMachiavellis Prince and Its Forerunners and F. Gilbert in TheHumanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli, both cited in n. 10above, set forth the history of Machiavellis precursors. But A. H. Gilbert whitewashesThe Princeas a typical bookde Regimine Principum, while F. Gilbert presentsThe Princeas a decisive break from the Christian and humanist tradition. L. Strauss, Thoughts of

Machiavelli(Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958), reasserts a basically Elizabethan viewof Machiavelli as anti-Christian; more recently, see R. A. Kocis,Machiavelli Redeemed:Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory(Cranbury, New Jer-

sey: Associated University Presses, 1998), 93103. Hulliung in Citizen Machiavelli, citedin n. 4 above, pp. 330, discusses these views. For recent discussions of Machiavellissubversion of classical models of prudence, see Mansfield,Machiavellis Virtue, cited inn. 6 above; V. Kahn, Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology,Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 105 (1990): 46476; Kahn,MachiavellianRhetoric, cited in n. 3 above,passim; E. Garver,Machiavelli and the History of Prudence(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and McCanles, The Discourse of IlPrincipe.

13A few critics have discussed this agonistic conception including M. Colish,CicerosDe Officiisand MachiavellisPrince,The Sixteenth Century Journal9 (1978):8193; I. Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, in I. Berlin,Against the Current: Essays

in the History of Ideas (New York: Penguin,1980),2579;J. H. Whitfield,Machiavelli (NewYork: Russell and Russell, 1965), 92105; and F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrineof Raison dEtat and Its Place in Modern History, tr. W. Stark (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1957), 2544. The most sustained reading to date is by Halliung, Citizen

Machiavelli.



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morally neutral statesmanship of grand actions.14 This view, how-ever, remains marginal in critical studies of humanism. Moreover, it

has not been related, as it needs to be, to a work that significantlyinfluenced cinquecento thoughtCiceros De Oratore. It is in this dia-logue that we find the most fully developed view of the civic leaderas one pitched in a heroic battle for preeminence that must rely onthe rhetoric of imposture.15 If the strain of civic humanism exem-plified byDe Oratore has yet to be fully appreciated in discussionsof Machiavelli, this is at least in part because it is still neglected indiscussions of Cicero himself.16 The agonistic context, then, of Romanrhetoric needs to be more fully explored for it provides the common

ground from which the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud andthe Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation spring.A clarification is needed, however, before we proceed. In some

obvious ways, The Prince and De Oratore are very different works.Cicero speaks to individuals who are politicians in the Roman state,and he assumes that their chief role is persuasion rather than theuse of military force. This distinction, of course, is fundamental tothe classical tradition extending at least as far back as the sophists(GorgiasEncomium of Helenfamously thematizes the contrast) and

even beyond them to Homer: bia andpeithoare often presented, asin the embassy scene of the Iliad or in Odysseus cunning rhetoric

14See especially Colish, Ciceros De Officiis and Machiavellis Prince. Kahn,Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, p. 32, in her discussion of the utile andthehonestum does not cite Colish, though she mentions in a note on p. 257 Colishsargument about Cicero as a proto-Machiavellian. J. F. Tinkler, Praise and Advice: TheRhetorical Approaches in Mores Utopia and MachiavellisThe Prince,The SixteenthCentury Journal 19 (1988): 187207, relies upon the Ciceronian project of bringing

honestas into alignment with utilitas and sees Machiavelli as deliberately setting theterms at odds.

15See M. Zerba, Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Ciceros De Oratore,Classical Philology97 (2002): 299321. Halliungs discussion of Cicero inCitizen Machi-avelli, cited in n. 4 above, does not treat De Oratore.

16Twenty years later, the view of Hulliung in Citizen Machiavelli, like that ofColish in Ciceros De Officiis and Machiavellis Prince, has still not been fullyassimilated. Wood in Ciceros Social and Political Thought, cited in n. 10 above, pp.17693, 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.

When Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, pp. 859, re-establishes thevalue of the Renaissance Machiavel against theorists of secular republicanism whodivorce rhetoric from politics, she glances at the alternative humanist tradition, butshe says little of Cicero. Zerba in Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Ciceros DeOratore, fully develops the case for this alternative Cicero.



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in theOdyssey, as alternative and even opposing methods by whichan agent may move others. But we need to approach the distinction

in a qualified way. Not only is the agonistic motive strong, as alreadynoted, in both the Greek and Roman contexts of rhetoric (deliberativeand forensic oratory are always overtly implicated in a war ofwords, epideictic usually tacitly so). In Ciceros world, many Romanpoliticiansarguably, the most prominent in the late Republicwereboth speakers and leaders of armies. Generals not infrequently heldthe role of consul, and proconsuls in the provinces typically hadcontrol of military force. Techniques of persuasion were pervasivelyintertwined with state-sanctioned violence, or in the case of the civil

wars of the first century BCE, with illegally seized violence, in waysthat are perhaps best epitomized by Ciceros own rhetorical attempts,conflicted as they were, to present the blood-steeped, autocraticstruggles of Julius Caesar as those of a man who had the restorationof the Republic at heart.17

Machiavelli, on the other hand, addresses a prince who, aboveall else, controls an army. The emphasis is signaled in the first chapterofThe Prince where the guiding interest of the text in those who seizenew states is qualified by the phrase, they may be acquired either

by force of other peoples arms or with ones own. But if the sinequa non of Machiavellian power is military might, then rhetoric is theskill that allows the prince to manipulate this might with politicaleffectiveness. Another way to put it is that an army is both therealistic agent of material conquest and a signifying entity whosemeaning goes well beyond the material one of conquering foes orsuppressing revolt. It is this capacity of an army to generate meaningthat necessitates rhetorical manipulation.18 The best prince is onewho can skillfully manage, through techniques of persuasion, the

all-important matter of public perception, especially as it relates toforce. We will elaborate these observations as we proceed in thediscussion. But at the outset, the reader may wish to conceptualize thetexts of Cicero and Machiavelli as chiastically related to each other,with rhetoric and military force assuming inverted but dialecticalrelationships.

17For recent discussions of Ciceros vacillating and deeply compromised rhetor-

ical stances toward Julius Caesar, see T. N. Mitchell,Cicero: The Senior Statesman(NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1991), 232325, and A. Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Timesof Romes Greatest Politician(New York: Random House, 2001), 20350.

18See K. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press,1950; rpt. 1969), 161.



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The teaching about the fox in Chapter 18 of The Prince willallow us to cut directly to the importance of rhetoric in Machiavellis

politics.19

While a prince may not have all the admirable qualitiestraditionally ascribed to a good ruler, Machiavelli says that

it is very necessary he should seem to have them (e bene necessario pareredi averle). Indeed, I will venture to say that when you have them andexercise them all the time, they are harmful to you (sonno dannose); whenyou just seem to have them, they are useful (sonno utili). It is good toappear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere, and religious; it is good to

be so in reality. But you must keep your mind so disposed that, in case ofneed, you can turn to the exact contrary.

The crucial thing is for the ruler to remain flexible and adaptable,as the winds of fortune and the varying circumstances of life maydictate. We see such adaptation best where the prince anticipates theneed for action contrary to conventional virtue. In cases like these,he simultaneously does what must be done and devises strategiesthat keep up the appearance of ordinary moral goodness. This ishow the man of virtue becomes the man ofvirtuby refusing tostand on the facile truths of ceremony, by ceaselessly innovating,by inventing himself out of the turbulent flux of the world.20 In afamous image, Machiavelli describes this seize-and-master attitudeby saying that Fortuna is a woman, and the man who wants tohold her down must beat and bully her (Chapter 25). Even in theface of princely machismo, she governs half our actions . . . but sheleaves the other half more or less in our power to control. That is

19On the fox and lion, see Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5 above,pp. 8590; Garver,Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, cited in n. 12 above, pp. 8691;

J.B. Atkinson, tr., Machiavelli: The Prince (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 27880;Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, cited in n. 2 above, pp. 1016; andA. H. Gilbert,Machiavellis Prince and Its Forerunners, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 11839.W. Rebhorn,Foxes and Lions: Machiavellis Confidence Men(Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1988), Chapter 1, has a more extended thematic treatment. On Machiavellisprimitivism, see A. Bonadeo, Corruption, Conflict, and Power in the Works and Timesof Niccolo Machiavelli, in University of California Publications in Modern Philology , 108(Berkeley:University of California Press, 1973), and D. Waley, The Primitivist Elementin Machiavellis Thought,Journal of the History of Ideas31 (1971): 9198.

20Treatments of Machiavellianvirtuare too numerous to list here, but among theones I have found most helpful for this study are those by Mansfield, Machiavellis

Virtue, cited in n. 6 above, pp. 652; Kahn,Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 4 above,pp. 843; Garver,Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, cited in n. 12 above, pp. 2691;M. Fleisher, A Passion for Politics: The Vital Core of the World of Machiavelli, inM. Fleisher ed.,Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum,1972), 11447; and Whitfield,Machiavelli, cited in n. 13 above, pp. 92105.



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to manage public perception with consummate shrewdness. He wasboth a lion and a fox.

The style of such passages as those in which Machiavelli praisesCesare Borgia is worth remarking. He yokes an encomiastic mo-tive with a language of unmitigated violence. Far from trying towhitewash a prince whom posterity has seen, by and large, as amonster, Machiavelli paints him in all his bloody grandeur. The im-pressive stature of the personage is conveyed vividly in descriptionsof him, in keeping with the encomiastic motive. But it is linked witha deliberately outrageous representation of no-holds-barred cruelty,which goes against the grain of traditional encomium. Borgia him-

self, of course, had to ameliorate his violence (present himself asjust) through dissociation and the use of a scapegoat. In this sense,he bowed to tradition. Not Machiavelli in his representation of Bor-gia. He unmasks his heros strategies of amelioration for what theyarecold-blooded yet effective means of pursuing acquisitive ends.Rhetorically, the ordinary positions of the one praising and the onepraised have been reversed, since the terms in which Borgias is de-scribed make him out to be morally less than what he made himselfout to be. But this morally less is then brilliantly upgraded in the

text when Machiavelli recontextualizes his hero according to a stan-dard not of virtue but ofvirtu.23 What better example could there bethan the mutilated body of Remirro de Orco to convey the point thatit is the prince, not those around him, who defines what is good?What better example that laying ones own foundation, is, in theultimate instance, a rhetorical act?

Therhetoricinthetextandtherhetoricofthetext:therelationshipof these two levels will help us understand both continuities andbreaks between Cicero and Machiavelli. Let us anticipate, however,

two key points. First, Machiavellis distinction lies not in saying whathas not been said about political powerthat it is often brutal andalways acquisitive.24 Rather, taking hold of what Aristotle called oneof the common topics (the more and the less), he presents theobject of praise as less virtuous and then goes on to elevate it

23Tinkler, Praise and Advice, cited in n. 14, speaks of Machiavellis replace-ment of the conventionally demonstrative approach to the speculumtradition, which

employs praise, with a deliberative approach, which sides with expediency againsthonor. I argue that Machiavelli is more extreme than that: he retains praise and couplesit with often brutal expediency.

24See Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 1820, and Alvarez, The MachiavellianEnterprise, cited in n. 5 above, pp. 7579.



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by redefining virtue.25 This is a classic rhetorical move: refusing tojettison the language of virtue, Machiavelli puts his own spin on it.

Cicero, too, will keep the language of virtue in his own encomium ofthe great and powerful in De Oratore. It is what he does with the lessvirtuous that distinguishes him from Machiavelli. The differenceis stylistic rather than substantive, though style reveals a good dealabout temperamental divergences between the two men.

There is one last point that needs saying before we move on toCicero. Deception and whitewashing are not, according to Machi-avelli, the practices of princes alone but of leaders of republics, aswell, notably those of the Roman republic. In the Discourses, he re-

verts often to an observation that is best summarized in the followingpassage: the Romans from their early beginnings employed fraud(la fraude), which it has ever been necessary for those to practice whofrom small origins wish to rise to the highest degree of power; andit is the less censurable (vituperabile) the more it is concealed (coperta),as was that practiced by the Romans (2.13).26 Numa, successor ofRomulus, is one of the primal founders credited with having intro-duced religion to the state not as a prophet who believed but as astrategist who feigned religious worship (he claimed a nymph di-

vulged to him his holy teaching) in order to make human depravityanswerable to the threat of punitive deities (1.11). Though the ex-ample is from Romes monarchical period, the claim advanced inthe chapters of the Discourses concerned with religion (1.1115) isthat a politics of dissimulation was coextensive with the foundingof the state and over time remained central to its greatness. Consulsand consular Comitii alike managed auguries artfully in wagingwar and in every other important civil or military action (1.14).The advice to rulers about the necessity of being hypocritical has

probably done more than anything else to darken Machiavellis rep-utation. Yet this advice does nothing worse than admonish princesto adopt a tactic that the youthful Cyrus was admonished to adoptin the first book of XenophonsCyropaedia, about which Machiavellisays: Xenophon draws no other conclusion from [Cyruss decep-tion] than that a prince who wishes to achieve great things mustlearn to deceive (2.13).27

25Aristotle,Rhetoric2.23.426Discourses1.47, 1.51, and 3.43 are also taken up with the subject of feigning and

self-deception.27Both Adams, rev. ed., The Prince, cited at beginning of endnotes, p. 48, and

Gilbert,Machiavellis Prince and Its Forerunners, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 75 and 126,discuss Machiavellis antecedents.



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In the preceding passages ofThe Prince, there is an interest inpenetrating through the mystery of hierarchy in order to reveal its

pantomimic quality, that is, the ways in which figures of authorityrhetorically manipulate the values of the group through both iden-tification (Borgias justice and Numas piety) and an effort attranscendence (Borgias stunning satisfaction of an audience andNumas prophetic aura as a man touched by god). There is alsoa thoroughgoing appreciation of the nature of rhetorical truth as con-structed. But this insight, rather than motivating laudatory terms forthe prince as a wise and just leader of people who chooses the bestopinions or upholds a moral order, instead produces a dyslogistic

vocabulary of fraud to describe actions that we are then invited toadmire as administratively compelling. Machiavelli, knowing fullwell that the opinions upon which political rhetoric operates do notfall within the true-false test of veracity, nonetheless chooses a delib-erately derogatory term to present princely falseness as an essentialtool of power. The ultimate motivation for this paradoxical down-grading, which also operates as an encomiastic plug, is human na-ture itself, which is driven by acquisitive wants and needs. Moralityis not an escape from this condition but a masking of it. It is precisely

this masking that allows for a mystification of powera mystifica-tion that Machiavelli reveals as such in his how-to manual. Ciceroperforms a similar act, but its tone and effect are different.

This brings us to De Oratore. The dissimulating practices advo-cated in The Prince and the Discourses, often illustrated with examplesdrawn from the Romans, are very much on display among the Ro-mans whom Cicero makes congregate at Crassus Tusculan villa dur-ing the Ludi Romani to discuss the art of persuasion. The implicationsof the setting are important: when the Romans are not engaged in the

struggle of politics or the conflict of war, they are spectators of athleticstruggle, and even in the pastoral countryside, where they appear towithdraw from the political and military arenas, conflict erupts asa natural expression of the rivalry between aristocratic males. Thislinkage helps to uncover a pattern basic to the give and take ofDeOratore: imitation (fundamental to the classical aesthetic) leads tocompetition, competition leads to invidiousness, and invidiousnessrequires rhetorical upgrading in order to preserve the image of a soci-ety led by noble and honorable men.28 At many points in the dialogue,

the interaction of the speakers becomes an exercise in rhetorical sub-

28My discussion is indebted to Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18, pp.49180



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terfuge that we are allowed to see as such, just as we are allowedto see the stratagems by which it is rendered socially palatable.

We can begin with an example in Book 2 when Antonius, takingthe lead from Crassus, elaborates on the duties of the orator (officiaoratoris). Correlating the traditional ends of rhetoric (probare, concil-iare, movere) with different styles, Antonius focuses on the two hedeems best able to win over an audience.29 One he calls an ethicalstyle centered on conciliation (in Orator, this is called the middlestyle, thegenus medium) and aimed at showing the audience tokens(signa) of good nature, generosity, clemency, piety, of a soul gratefuland not covetous or grasping, and all those things typical of men who

are upright, humble, not violent, not obstinate, not contentious, notharsh . . . . Antonius argues for the utility of showing off such tokens.When we do so, it is as if the speech is portraying the character of thespeaker (ut quasi mores oratoris effingat oratio). Those who adopt suchstrategies appear to be (videantur) upright, well-bred, and virtuousmen (2.184).

The language of appearing to be permeates De Oratore, thoughthe dialogue generally avoids stating the doctrine of semblance inbold terms. This, of course, is an old theme. Having struggled against

the dangers of mere rhetorical opinion (doxa) in such early di-alogues as Gorgias, Plato laid the groundwork for a philosophicalrhetoric inPhaedrusthat would be wed to the rehabilitating and pu-rifying powers of dialectic. It was the possibility of a truth-tellingrhetoric that Aristotle tried to develop in his own work on the sub-ject when he articulated a hierarchy of rhetorical means withlogosinthe role of controlling the errant powers ofethosand pathos.30 Phi-losophizing much less than his Greek predecessors about the matter,Cicero simply lets the pull of opinion, which is intimately connected

with ethos andpathos, to carry the course of his argument. That manip-ulation of opinion need not be identified, tout court, with deception

29Cicero correlates the three styles of oratory (grand, middle, plain) with thethree rhetorical ends (moving, pleasing, teaching) in Orator. De Oratore hardly uses thescheme. For a discussion see D. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style inthe English Renaissance(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1454; H. Gotoff,Ciceros Elegant Style: An Analysis of the Pro Archia (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1979), 4265; and H. M. Hubbell, Cicero on Styles of Oratory,Yale Classical

Studies19 (1966): 17186.30For a fuller discussion, see M. Gellrich, AristotlesRhetoric: Theory, Truth, and

Metarhetoric, in M. Griffith and D. Mastronarde eds. Cabinet of the Muses: Essayson Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1990), 24256.



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is not a point argued in the text. The reader is left to surmise thepossibilities that inhabit the world of rhetorical seeming, from the

benign display of tokens of good will to the masterful perpetrationof fraud (Borgia-style, for example).But not quite left to surmise. Guided, channeled, or perhaps

trained into double vision would be a better way of putting it, forCicero wants to keep our sight on the connection between seemingand moral uprightness, at the same time that considerable static isbeing thrown up around the connection. He does so by making Anto-nius imitate, in the passage cited above, the very lenitasand urbanitasthat are being promoted in conciliatory speech: the problems of sem-

blance recede behind a modest tone and a courteous diction clearlyaimed at fosteringbenevolenia. In short, the dialogue enacts, here andelsewhere, strategies ofethosby which seeming to be, in the verymoment of being described, can avoid association with imposture ordeception. Our guard is dropped, our censure silenced, when appear-ance, as rhetorical technique, is linked with the solicitation of goodwill and thus sequestered from what Cicero, in the shadow of Platoand Aristotle, feels to be the dark side.31 This is precisely the methodMachiavelli admires of the Romans in Discourses 2.13. But as the con-

trast with Machiavellis treatment shows, Cicero is engaged in thebusiness of rhetorically upgrading semblance, euphemizing it, whennecessary, so that it does not appear morally debasedat least notin the model orator. The strongest language we get in Cicero alongthis axis is dissimulatio, an ameliorated term for what Machiavellitypically prefers to callla fraude.

If the conciliatory style linked withethosis one way of winningan audience, there is another, more potent way. This resides in thegrand or passionate style, which works not by ingratiating but by

forcefully moving. Cicero, himself famous for it, uses the imageryof fire and withering devastation inDe Oratoreto describe its effects

31The argument is laid out more fully in Zerba, Love, Envy, and PantomimicMorality in Ciceros De Oratore, cited in n. 15. For recent treatments of Cicero con-cerned with matters of pretense, see B. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language ofSocial Performance(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); E. Gunderson, Staging

Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World(Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 2000); J. Hall, Social Evasion and Aristocratic Manners in Ciceros

De Oratore,American Journal of Philology 117 (1996): 95120; H. Gotoff, Oratory: theArt of Illusion,Harvard Studies in Classical Philology95 (1993): 289313; and N. Rudd,Stratagems of Vanity: Cicero,Ad Familiares5.12, and Plinys Letters, in T. Woodmanand J. Powell eds., Author and Audience in Latin Literature (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), 1832.



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(2.5153). Vehement oratory with its powerful arousal of emotionoffers, in situations where it can be successfully vented, a shortcut to

the perception of probity. Whether or not a speaker is morally gooddissolves in the onslaught of a display so fiery and captivating thatan audience will believe anything the speaker wants them to. Herewe have a locus classicus of what Longinus, adapting conventionalrhetorical categories, calls the sublime orator, the speaker who blazes,pierces, and assaults his way to transport.32 That the vehement styleis a weapon in the rhetorical armory of the speaker as imposter ismade obvious inDe Oratorein several ways.

A vivid instance occurs when Antonius describes the challenge

he faced in defending Caius Norbanus, former tribune of the people,against charges of sedition. The prosecutor was Sulpicius, one ofthe young, gifted interlocutors in the dialogue who sits at the feetof his masters. Sulpicius youth, Antonius observes, made it all themore embarrassing for him, an older man of censorian rank, to standup in this case and defend the uses of sedition. Antonius claimsthe judgment ought to have been decided against him, not onlybecause his client, Caius Norbanus, was guilty of wrongdoing (headmits this) but because Sulpicius, his opponent, handled himself

from beginning to end with a force and indignation and fiery spirit(vi et dolore et ardore animi) that made his rival fear to draw closeand put it out (2.19597). Antonius, however, did draw close, and hemet fire with fire. He put on a display of inflammatory rhetoric thatcompletely belied the moral misgivings he felt about the case andthat stirred up support for Norbanus. That was how the prosecutionwas overthrown. In response to this recounting of a past rhetoricalcontest, Sulpicius says with half-dazed wonder: Never did I seeanything slip from my hands the way that case slipped from mine!

(2.202). Cicero stages this response to confirm how successful thedeceptions of the grand style can be. He also means to showcase,through the dynamics of student-and-master dialogue, a lesson aboutpantomimic morality. When winning is the object, a speaker must beprepared to uphold what he deems to be an immoral cause by arguingas if it were just.33

32I 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 composedOn the Sublimewas a writer of the first century CE.33For a recent discussion of actorliness in Ciceros rhetorica, with full scholarly

references, see Gunderson, Staging Masculinity, cited in n. 31, pp. 11148 and 187221. 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-



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As a highly successful advocate, Cicero himself, of course, wasintimately familiar with the provisional nature of rhetorical truth and

was fully prepared to reverse his moral standards, if necessary, to wina case. This was clear in such instances as his forensic defense of aprovincial governor who faced corruption charges of the very sortfor which he had successfully prosecuted Verres. But it was also clearin the deliberative rhetoric on behalf of Julius Caesar in which heshowed a willingness to engage after his return from exile in 57 BCE;the complex web of politics in which he was enmeshed had madehim beholden to the very man whose autocratic ambitions he mostfeared. Caesar was responsible not only for Ciceros release from exile

but for a loan of 800,000 sesterces that helped Ciceros family in theirfinancial quandaries. This was the sort of complexity that created thehighly compromised rhetorical postures Cicero assumed in the yearsthat the Republic was collapsing. His sense that moral idealism wasfoolish and potentially deadly in such situations is wittily recordedin a letter he wrote to Atticus in which he observed of the ever high-minded Cato, I have a warm regard for him as you do. The factremains that with all his patriotism, he can be a political liability. Hespeaks in the Senate as if he were living in Platos Republic instead

of Romuluss cesspool. 34

This leads to a key point: Ciceros lettersand the speeches, taken as a corpus, provide a realistic view of moralshiftiness in a rhetorical context that the theory does not so muchreject by adopting idealism as dissimulate by adopting euphemism.We will return to this matter shortly.

As narrated, the Norbanus case is emblematic of larger patternsof Roman conduct depicted in De Oratore and already summed upearlier in the essay. Education is a process of the young (Sulpicius)imitating models, either directly (the elder Antonius) or indirectly

(the elder Antonius texts); imitation of other males in the context ofpolitics leads to competition; competition and the need to win lead toinvidious matches in which envy between rivals, because it involvesmoral deception, must be masked or upgraded. The desire for honordrives the dynamics. In Machiavelli, it would be rendered in the dys-logistic language of fraud and acquisitiveness; in Cicero, it appearsas a teleologically structured drama of the better man legitimately

atrical elements. Also see E. S. Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).34See the excellent discussion of Everitt,Cicero,cited in n. 17 above, pp. 129 and

14677, butpassim in the latter third of the book. The quotation is taken from Letters toAtticus 12 (XI.I) inCiceros Letters to Atticus, ed. and tr. D.R. Shackleton-Bailey. 7 vols.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196570); quoted in Everitt, p. 129.



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seeking advantage. What remains unassimilated is the rhetoricallydowngraded (self-) characterization of Antonius as a censor who de-

fended sedition, and that is the touch that lends particularly sharpinsight into the more general rhetorical rehabilitation in which thepassage is invested. This is an excellent example of the ambiguity ofthe better man: Antonius, the one who holds the socially hierarchi-cal role, happens also to hold the morally lesser groundpreciselythe kind of situation that Cicero finesses (conciliates) when he at-tempts to yoke, as if it were unproblematic, seeming good and beinggood. Antonius, however, did not dally with conciliation in the Nor-banus case. He tore loose with the vehement style, which he now

mimics in his treatment of it at second remove. The difference isthat when the style is used in a theoretical treatment of style, thereader is invited to see technique as such, just as in the previouslydiscussed passage on ethos. This is the very opposite of the live or-atorical situation in which the speaker must mask technique. Onlywhen the speeches are seen as a body of work, that is, collected andstudied, does the role of artifice and moral double-dealing becomeapparent. If it were obtrusive in the moment of persuasion, it wouldbe self-defeating.

Since Antonius is the one who narrates the Norbanus passage, itis probable that his willingness to admit a less-than-luminous moralfoundation for his winning defense is related to another needonethat comes not from the drama described within the Sulpicius storybut from the drama that can be inferred in the social group to whichAntonius is speakingthe audience that composes the dialogue inDe Oratore. That is, Antonius must couch his win in such a way asto mitigate the envy he may arouse in the audience who is listeningto him recount it. He is obviously alert to the dynamic of envy in

the story he tells since he is reliving the emotion that was aroused inhim by the extraordinary rhetorical performance of a younger manwho engaged in heightened aemulatio (socialized envy) and nearlywrested victory from him. It is no surprise, then, that very shortlyafter this anecdote Antonius launches into a fuller discussion of thenature and effects ofinvidia. In doing so, he allows a more penetratingview of his specious legal win.

Any effort on the part of a speaker to feature his status as a goodman will encounter the hard, cold fact of human envy, which is a

vice, Antonius tells us, more violent and widespread than any other(2.209). In an intensely competitive world, seeming virtuous necessi-tates other perception-bending screens that can allay an audiencessuspicion of a speakers superiority. No one loves a man who is fullof himself. High achievers and winners run the risk of alienating



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erated envy is often implicated in scenarios of courtship, but pointingit out allows us to see that the rhetorical act of identifying with an

audience through the exploitation of opinion, which is the essenceof persuasion, can be tinged with erotic overtones.36

Even the best among men, in their clamor to get to the top,engage in witting deceptions that are bred by rivalry and envy. It ispredictable, given the desire of humans to have more than others,that Cicero regards tyranny as a constant threat to civic order.37 Thepervasiveness of pravitas (depravity), and of invidia, in particular,explains why benevolentia, is always sliding over into its close relative,amor, inDe Oratore. The terminological slippage records the need for

hyperbole: given the virulence of envy, an equally potent antidote forit must be invented in the rhetorical realm. Goodwill cannot standup to an emotion that threatens to swallow everything in a swell ofmalevolence. The bond of identification with the audience, whichis what persuasion is all about, must be inflated into the rhetoricof loveas in the previous scenarioif the divisive force of a greathuman fault is to be overcome. The exaggeration on the rhetoricalscale again reveals the necessity of posing.38

It is somewhat ironic, given the attention to envy in his rhetorical

works, that Cicero did not handle well the dynamics of envy in hisown public life and frequently got into political trouble for failing toevidence humility toward his achievements. His endless self-praisein the handling of the Catilinian conspiracy is a good example; itirritated and alienated people and specifically fed the animus ofthe populist Clodius who plotted against him.39 But we see here asignal point: Cicero was a novus homo in Rome who frequently feltthe insecurity of having come from a non-aristocratic background.He sometimes showed a certain ineptness in the public relations

he practiced on his own behalf, at least in part because the lack ofillustrious ancestors made him feel he had to keep himself in thepublic eye by ostentation and self-aggrandizing praise. Antoniusand Crassus, his heroes inDe Oratore, were from prominent Romanfamilies, fully socialized into the company of elite Roman males,and thus better able to manipulate the rhetoric of self-abnegationa

36Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18, developed a theory of rhetoric in whichcourtship has a central conceptual role; see especially pp. 20844.

37See De Officiis 1.8.26; Republic 1. 52, 68; 2. 4748; and Laws 1.3233. Wood, CicerosSocial and Political Thought, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 17982, has an excellent discussion.

38On hyberbole in Machiavelli, see Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3above, pp. 2533.

39See the discussion of Everitt,Cicero, cited in n. 17 above, pp. 11345.



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rhetoric Cicero entirely comprehended but had trouble performingin his own interest.

It would be useful, at this point, to study an example taken fromMachiavelli of someone who tried but failed to manage the dynamicsof public envy and distrust. Appius Claudiusa Roman who livedabout 350 years before Antonius and 400 years before Cicerowaschief of the group of ten patricians known as the Decemvirate who in451 BCE were given exceptional powers to adopt a new code of lawsin Rome. Discussing his fate inDiscourses1.4042, Machiavelli saysthe Decemvirs conducted themselves civilly and modestly underthe leadership of Appius, a sagacious yet turbulent man who had

made himself so popular by his manners, that it seemed a wonderhow he could in so short a time have acquired, as it were, a newnature and a new spirit, having until then been regarded as a cruelpersecutor of the people (1.40). The people, interestingly, neverquite trusted that Appius newfound urbanity and affability werereal and remained on guard until, true to his nature, he transgressedin attempting to carry off by violence a patrician woman, Virginia.In doing so, he violated what Machiavelli took to be a prime taboofor a leader against interfering with the property of his citizens

and subjects or with their women (The Prince, Chapter 17). Hisactions had consequences not only for him but also for the otherDecemvirs, who were forced to abdicate their magistracy. Aboutthis, Machiavelli remarks the following: besides the other errorscommitted by Appius in attempting to maintain his tyranny, thatof changing too suddenly from one quality to the extreme oppositewas of no little moment (1.41). His deception, in other words, waspoorly managedhypocritical in an obvious way. The conclusion isnot hard to draw: though the susceptibility of people to appearances

offers an opportunity for feigning, a leader must exhibit art in histechnique. Human nature may invite a politics of fraud, but successin manipulating it depends upon the creative talent of the one wholeads. The security of the ruler should be in his own hands and notin that of others, as Machiavelli reiterates in The Prince. Which is tosay that, even more than his actions, his rhetorical presentation of hisactions are his to master. Appius Claudius failed in both.

We are dealing here with a man who exemplifies a cardinalMachiavellian premise about human naturethat it is acquisitive

and given to greed. The difference between Appius Claudius andan effective leadersomeone such as Pope Alexander VI in ThePrince, a consummate foxlies not in their nature but in the factthat one knew how to shape public perception while the other didnot. A political leader is necessarily involved in manipulating the



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This is the source of Machiavellis famous primitivism, that is, hiscultivated style of rendering in the raw language of rhetorical prac-

tice the modes of conduct that rhetorical theory had traditionallypatched over. When we hear that men are so simple of mind andso much dominated by their immediate needs that a deceitful manwill always find plenty who are ready to be deceived; that a rulermust above all abstain from taking the property of others, becausemen are quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of a patri-mony; and that the masses are always impressed by the superficialappearance of things (Chapter 18), we are hearing de-euphemizeddescriptions of what Cicero whitewashed. His whitewashing, how-

ever, has more than a palimpsestic effect. In De Oratore, the readeris allowed to witness ways in which the principles of being a goodspeaker are complicated or belied in the very act of being proferred.The dialogue, in this sense, may be read as self-deconstructing.

Because he gazes steadily into the maelstrom of a world drivenby the insatiability of the will to acquire and because he comprehendsthe contradictoriness of human want in an environment of limitedresources, Machiavellis prince is able to enter into a more complex,self-limiting, and, ironically, more honest dialectical relationship with

those he rules. Not that he reveals his motivesthe cases of Borgiaand his father, Alexander VI, demonstrate the need for continuousduplicitybut that being guided by a manual which makes nopretence at idealism, the prince is less likely to be confused by themisguidednotionthatthebestrulerisagoodmanskilledinspeaking.He understands the necessity of hard-boiled practices of governanceand knows that something resembling virtue, if you follow it, maybe your ruin, while something else resembling vice will lead, if youfollow it, to your security and well-being. This stance is doubly

rhetorical. It requires in the first instance an ability to choose thebest act suited to the situation (what the Greeks called seizingkairos)and in the second an ability to present this choice as morally upright.Even when the prince cannot do the latter, he must be prepared to actshrewdly and wipe up the mess laterfor example, through long-term policies that are more easily rendered palatable. Machiavellisown rhetoric is notorious because it refuses to comply with thesecond instancethat is, his political theory resolutely rejects thetraditionally sanctioned need for moral whitewashing.

Ciceros stance is also doubly rhetoricalthe best speaker fits hisspeech to the occasion and not to his nature, and then tries to sell thisfit as true to his nature, which must appear good by standards of thesocial group he is trying to persuade. But there is a sacrificial castto Ciceros rhetoric on rhetoric: he both advocates and demonstrates



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how one turns acquisitive motives into forms of working for thesocial good or struggling that the people may have more, that is,

into forms of benign advantage.41

Theory masks self-interest in thetrappings of theres publica, the common thing. This is how Cicerodiffers from Machiavelli. And yet the masking frequently appearsas such in De Oratore because the dialogue is highly involved withthe question of technique. It appears, however, through indirection,which amounts to a form of euphemistic deflecting.

We encounter, at this point, a paradox. Despite the sacrificialrhetoric, one often senses that the Ciceronian orator is so consumedby the heroic struggle to be first among equals that his declared inter-

est in maintaining the health of the state becomes a pretext screeningthe rivalries of aristocratic males. In Ciceros own life, the acquisitivewas always rearing its head above the sacrificialfrom his numer-ous well-appointed villas (the gems of Italy, he called them) to hisself-promoting obsession with publishing his own speeches to hissolicitation of writers to memorialize him in epic-style histories. Thisis not to say that Cicero was not the sincere, eloquent, and bravedefender of the Roman Republic that tradition has passed down tous. It is to say that nothing in the realm of political competition is

immune from the acquisitive motive and, consequently, invidious-ness. This is why imposture is deeply implicated in the vision of civicrepublicanism that emerges fromDe Oratore. What is so Ciceronianabout this vision is, as we have seen, the rhetoric of concealment thatattends itthe urbanitas of the ethical style that bathes the realityof predatory motives in a soothing golden haze or the ardor of thevehement style that consumes real moral double-dealing in the fireof transport. Ciceros rhetorics, both those he extols in De Oratore andthose he uses, dissimulate the hypocrisy of the most distinguished

viri boni, who could never rise to the status they enjoy without feign-ing the morality they seem to possess. This is duplicity at two levels,that of the subjects discussed and of the one discussing them. Wecould put it another way: because the text ofDe Oratoreprotects aninterest by using terms not incisive enough to critique it thoroughly,its rhetoric verges on cunning.42

Machiavellis rhetoric on rhetoric, by contrast, is distinguishedby a harshly naturalistic terminology and a tendency toward exhor-tations about governancethis is how you maintain the state. The

41I borrow the term sacrificial rhetoric from Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, citedin n. 18 above, pp. 15866.

42See Burke,A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 36



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cold realism of his approach subsumes sacrificial motives to admin-istrative efficacy. Moreover, there is no golden haze that bathes the

Machiavellian landscape with the fictional aura of a world that mayone day find the best men cooperating in the interests of achievinguniversal peace. Human motives, as depicted in both The PrinceandtheDiscourses, are the conditions for a permanent and irremediabledivisiveness that can be overcome only to the extent that a rulermay cooperate with his people in preserving their security and wel-fare. The Machiavellian army is a constant reminder that even if astate reaches a high degree of nationalistic unity, it will have enemiesthreatening its borders or will itself be threatening the borders of an-

other. In such circumstances, the interests that the prince protects arespecial interests; his challenge, which is partly empirical and partlyrhetorical, is to take the narrowly special interests that he embodies asone acquisitive individual among many and identify them with thebroader special interests of the state. The process has a pathologicalelement in it that can become frightening when those broader specialinterests are rhetorically fobbed off as the interests of the entire world.This is what can happen with aggressive imperialism, and when it iscombined with the cult of a dictator, we have the case of a Julius Cae-

sar, who was sacrificed in a political climate that partly faulted himfor lacking adequate sacrificial motives himselfor worse, a Hitlerwho perpetrated genocide as an act of legitimate self-preservationuntil the brute fiction by which he identified himself with the worldrecoiled on him.

Machiavelli exposes and anatomizes the conditions by whichindividuals rise to become rulers. The deceptionthe fraudheadvocates is necessitated by the fact that what we thinkwe are hasevolved in an inverted relationship to what we really are. This state of

delusion is the moral fog through which the aspirant to power mustnavigate, and he can only do so by first distancing himself from it,in order to understand it, and then resubmitting himself to it throughrhetorical identification, in order to manipulate it. As scandalous assuch a politics might seem, they are articulated by a man who refusesto submit to the mystification of his predecessors, who refuses todouble the deception about which he speaks by repeating it in hisown account. If we look at it this way, we can see how Cicero is moreMachiavellian than Machiavelli, for the author ofThe Princeand the

Discourses is not a deceiver at second remove. The entire drama ofstrife and pantomimic morality in Machiavellis politics is orientedtoward a less scandalous teaching than the one we have identified inDe Oratore: when deliberation is wholly concerned with the safetyof the country, no weight should be given to considerations of what is



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just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or ignominious; rather,without regard to anything else, one should wholly follow the course

of action that will save the life and maintain the liberty of the country(Discourses, 3.41).43

Let us, in closing, shift rhetorical registers. Ciceros princes, ifwe can call them that, always have their best clothes on. When helets us see beyond the aura of their respectability into their tactics, assuch, the effect is voyeuristic; we are allowed a glimpse of what isbeyond appearances, and what we see is naughty. They shouldnt bebehaving as they do, and we shouldnt be watching them but we are.There is pleasure in this peeping, the pleasure of being let into the

secrets of those who are privileged, removed from us, godlike. Theeffect of reading Machiavelli is different. His men do what they dobecause they must, given how human societies cohere, and we muststeady ourselves to see them in their unaesthetic nakedness if we areto understand how brutal and relentless their task ishow brutaland relentlesswemake it. Their bodies are scarred and wounded butintensely muscular. They make us think of what we have come fromthat we thought we had left behind at some unnamed point in timewhen we became civilized. They, like Ciceros few good men, are an

elite, but we hesitate to examine them closely because if we do wewill see imprinted in their bodies the story of who we really are, thestory we prefer to forget, we who wear clothes and pretend that weare what we seem to be. They might be epic heroes if they had adivine machinery to give them grandeur; they might be tragic heroesif they were torn by anguish; they might be picaros if they couldhave more fun and take some time to tilt at windmills.44 But they arehybrids that defy the law of genre. They have taken on the necessityof hiding part of what they are so they can appear like those who

have cut their claws and rounded their fangs, except that sometimesthe claws must come out, the fangs must be bared, if we are to be

43This assessment, while indebted to Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, citedin n. 5 above, and Kahn,Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, moves toward newconclusions.

44Rebhorn,Foxes and Lions, cited in n. 19 above, pp. 13587, argues for the princeas 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 Machiavellis criteria. Others have seen the prince as atragic 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, Theoryas Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992), 14781, argues more convincingly for the prince as a picaresque hero.



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