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Machiavelli’s Rome and Sparta

In the dedicatory letter to his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli reveals his intended audience, “I have chosen not those who are princes, but those who for their infinite good parts deserve to be; not those who could load me with ranks, honors, and riches but those who, though unable, would wish to do so.” Machiavelli wishes to address the aspiring prince, the man of virtù, the man who ought to rule. This man, as opposed to princes of fortune who inherit their principalities, is worthy; Machiavelli holds him in the highest esteem because he is a man unabashedly ruled by his great and ferocious appetite, which he fulfills through his moxie and anticipation. It follows, then, that Machiavelli is most in favor of the sort of regime that will allow these appetitive and political men to rule. Such a regime could not be based on hereditary rule, for in that instance the prince would come to rule by mere chance, not virtù. The best regime must form institutions which allow men of virtù to rule. For this reason, Machiavelli prefers republics to principalities; for a republican form of government allows men of ambition to exercise their virtù, creating the conditions for a succession of good princes. In a principality, the man of princely virtù remains confined to a political scheme which is limited by inheritance and the accidents of birth; in a republic, a succession of aspiring princes may perform repeated and extraordinary feats of political action.
Of all historical republics, Machiavelli most favors Rome;[1] for in his account, Rome’s political system and institutions reward virtù to a greater extent than other mixed regimes, like Sparta. According to Machiavelli, whose account of Roman history is nothing short of a remarkable act of concealment, this was due to the internal tension between the plebeians and the patricians, which drove the republic toward expansionary and imperial policy. Its institutions and its policy corresponded directly with nature as he understands it. Further, Machiavelli favors Rome over Sparta because of his preference for the popolo rather than the grandi. In Machiavelli’s account, the Spartan Republic was formed to favor the grandi in order to preserve the city, its institutions, and its mores, in its original form. Sparta, in other words, did not properly utilize men of virtù, men of extreme appetite, because it failed to reward the moxie and cunning of the aspiring prince. Those potential princes among the popolo, who might otherwise act on their lustful ambition, had no political outlet. For Machiavelli, the popolo, increasingly important in Rome’s political affairs, drove the republic to extensive imperial acquisition – the outward sign of a succession of good princes.[2] The underlying reasoning for Roman acquisition was not only a desire for lands, but a desire for glory. Romans, unlike the austere and public-minded Spartans, desired to attain personal glory.[3] Thus the Romans implicitly understood the Lucretian thesis: that all things are in perpetual flux; men are but ears of corn and regimes are ever-rising and falling. For Machiavelli, therefore, Lycurgus misunderstood this point when he founded his radically conservative regime on the grandi, on the old, a faction by nature conservative, and which will look always to the preservation of its own property and security. Thus, Machiavelli prefers Rome to Sparta, because it, through its political institutions, better recognizes and directs man’s overwhelming political appetites.
Popolo & Grandi    
Machiavelli expresses the fundamental difference between the Spartan and Roman republics, writing that “[w]ith the Lacedemonians… [the guard of freedom] has been put in the hands of the nobles; but with the Romans it was put in the hands of the plebs.” Though this is generally true of Rome, the extent to which it is the case depends on the specific era of the Roman Republic.[4] Machiavelli likewise overemphasizes the aristocratic nature of Sparta for the sake of contrast.[5] In any case, Machiavelli continues, arguing that the nobles have an innate desire to dominate, while the people have only a desire to not be dominated, being themselves unable. Here, however, we must note that Machiavelli later alters this teaching in one fundamental way: some among the popolo might be aspiring princes and some among the grandi aspiring mediocrities; lust–a political virtù–is decidedly not tied to birthright.[6] In The Prince Machiavelli argues similarly that the popolo make a prince the prince so that they might better satisfy their appetites. If the prince can merely protect the property of the people, and keep them free from servitude, they will ask little more of him. He must ensure that “his citizens, always and in every kind of circumstance, have need of his state and of himself, and then they will always be faithful to him.” Machiavelli, however, ultimately prefers popular republics. For, he writes in his Discourses,
he who defends the Spartan and Venetian order says that those who put the guard in the hands of the powerful do two good works: one is that they satisfy their ambition more, and having more part in the republic through having this stick in hand, they have cause to be more content; the other is that they take away a quality of authority from the restless spirits of the plebs that is the cause of infinite dissensions and scandals in a republic and is apt to reduce the nobility to a certain desperation that with time produces bad effects.
It is said by those who prefer stable regimes that the rule of the grandi is superior; for they are content with their wealth and honors, and they wish to attain what they have, whereas the people are tumultuous and often desperate. In light of this observation, Machiavelli reverses course; though Machiavelli is concerned with political security, he ultimately rejects aristocratic rule; for “if you are reasoning either about a republic that wishes to make an empire, such as Rome, or about one for whom it is enough to maintain itself. In the first case, it is necessary for it to do everything as did Rome; in the second, it can imitate Venice and Sparta…” It is noteworthy here that Machiavelli connects Rome and the rule of the popolo to imperial conquest. A more democratic people, guided by appetite, will desire always to acquire and pursue gain; they will be restless and busy, always seeking to tear down distinctions of honors and wealth, looking to attain greater lands and security. Machiavelli prefers a regime which has the institutions to direct the appetitive passions both inward, culminating in a battle between the many and the few within the confines of the law, and outward, against other regimes; for only then might a republic achieve greatness. Thus, honor must be undermined as a valid ground for political action; only necessity and appetite can guide the prince.
It is for these reasons that Machiavelli rejects the noble and honorable as mere fabrications. Lycurgus organized an honor-based regime; for according to Xenophon, “[h]e caused his people to choose an honourable death in preference to a disgraceful life.” Machiavelli finds this abhorrent; such men chose death for fiction; they are the lion without the fox. The few and honorable rule the timocracy. Lycurgus leveled property ownership across the citizenry, establishing rule based not on property ownership, equality, or the rule of the stronger, but on honor in service of the city, at the behest of the city’s religion, of which Machiavelli is universally dismissive. Honor is a myth, a means by which the ruling class can get people to act as they wish; anybody who pursues honor or holds it to be anything other than a certain political technology lacks princely virtù.
Imperial Acquisition & Domestic Preservation
If Rome wished to remove the causes of tumults, according to Machiavelli, it would “remove too the cause of expansion.” For only in the tension which arises between the people and the powerful does a republic gain the energy and vigor needed for imperial acquisition. Rome could not, “like Sparta, refuse to increase the number of citizens if it wished to make a great empire.” And greatness, not endurance, for Machiavelli is the standard by which a city ought to be measured. The narrow ruling class of Sparta makes for a republic which is difficult to conquer, and which one has no fear of being conquered by; but this is insufficient, for such a regime will not attain the same glories, or produce such a great succession of princes as a republic such as Rome:
I believe that it is necessary to follow the Roman order and not that of the other republics–for I do not believe one can find a mode between the one and the other–and to tolerate the enmities that arise between the people and the senate, taking them as an inconvenience necessary to arrive at Rome’s greatness.
For Machiavelli, the apparent solution to any political problem leads only to a new and unexpected political problem. Thus, when Lycurgus creates a republic which reduces the enmities between the people and the powerful, he creates a new problem: a stagnancy in the republic, a lack of growth, an attempt at creating an artificial and denaturing suspension of time. This stagnation is precisely the idleness against which Machiavelli rails; for one can never conquer fortune without the necessity of virtù. Further, Machiavelli asserts that popular-elite tumults, when bound by law, may actually contribute to the stability of the regime, implying that Rome may be not only greater, but a more stable model to imitate than Sparta.
According to Plutarch, Lycurgus brought many extreme and austere practices to Sparta, depriving the Spartans of the opportunity for acquisition, especially the acquisition of luxuries and large property holdings. Plutarch writes that Lycurgus made a “new division of their lands” to address the extreme inequalities that pervaded Sparta before his reformation. He divided the land holdings into sizes that would not be so large as to aid the Spartans in the attaining of luxuries, but would be “sufficient to keep their bodies in good health and strength.” But “superfluities they were better without.” Lycurgus further limited acquisition by dividing money evenly among citizens in order to remove all pervasive inequalities from the city. To do so, he called all gold and silver coins into his possession, replacing them with unwieldy chunks of spoiled iron. In this way, he made the acquisition of wealth not only difficult but undesirable. In limiting personal acquisition, he sought also to place strict limits on the desire for political acquisition. All things in Lycurgus’ Sparta were to be subservient to the good of the city; individual desire had no place so long as it ran contrary to the common good.
Lycurgus’ foreign policy was likewise limited and austere because rule was in the hands of the grandi, who have a desire to dominate that which they rule, and do not desire imperial expansion; they are possessed by idleness. The Spartans wished primarily to avoid imperial pursuits, understanding their effect on the character of a people. For no republic can pursue imperial expansion and maintain its original form. For Machiavelli, this seems to be an inevitable part of the wheel of fortune which spins imprudent regimes on their heads.
Further, Machiavelli subtly criticizes Lycurgus’ lawgiving. While he praises Lycurgus for laying down laws which did not need to be altered, he also attributes to Lycurgus the absence of any “dangerous tumult,” that is, an absence of bare, private interest which can be harnessed to drive the regime. A tumult, of course, is what he later praises as the very cause of Rome’s greatness. It should be noted that, among other things, tumults arise from the unequal distribution of honors or property – inequalities which the Lycurgan reforms sought to undo. Thus Machiavelli, while perhaps praising Lycurgus’ abilities as a lawgiver in his ability to achieve his task of preventing tumults, fundamentally questions his wisdom: why would he have avoided the thing that makes republics great? For Machiavelli, Lycurgus formed a mixed republic which, through its long life, achieved the “highest praise for himself, and quiet in [Sparta],” praising him for the city’s longevity. But if longevity is not Machiavelli’s standard for a good regime, certainly quietness is not. Machiavelli comments that the founding of Rome was not like that of Sparta: “so many accidents arose in it through the disunion between the plebs and the Senate that what an orderer had not done, chance did.” And it is this “disunion of the plebs and the senate” that formed a perfect republic.
Rather than direct human desires toward greatness, Lycurgus sought to stifle them through a political education directed to the subservience of individual greatness to the common good. In this way he could subordinate the individual to the city, the man to the whole, and the appetite to reason. Machiavelli’s prince is to take precisely the opposite approach; he desires not to become a part of the whole but to transcend it, to direct it, and to gain glory in war and politics–a republic will function only insofar as men learn from his Prince, becoming aspiring princes themselves.
Private Glory & Public Austerity
Machiavelli grounds his advice to aspiring princes on the desire for private glory. For if man is ruled by his appetites, and he is always rising and falling in fortune, the aspiring prince surely desires to conquer fortune and fulfill his appetites. Thus the prince of virtù is not only a man of superior appetite, but one who knows how to get what he wants; ignorance of prudence is the greatest sin. Machiavelli looks to offer a deconstructive education to this man, teaching him that he must cease to be ruled by rules of honor, custom, or religion, which bind men to so-called moral action. The aspiring tyrant must also forgo Christian gratitude and compassion, understanding that these are not politically viable. Little room for friendship remains for Machiavelli’s restless prince. In this way, his thought appears to be anti-classical; good government emerges from disunion, a people who desire acquisition, and a distinct lack of moral education for the people. For a moral education would cause them to become split-minded, more likely to pursue the “middle way” that Aristotle and the humanists expressed preference for in their praise of moderation. The absence of a paideia–an education that is no longer possible–is essential to Machiavelli’s political teaching. For a paideia, traditionally understood, would require the subordination of private desire to the rule of reason and the common good. Machiavelli offers the teaching of prudence. Philosophy and Christianity, then, have both worked against nature. They seek to restrain what they instead ought to cultivate.
It should be noted here that the thinking of both Machiavelli and Lycurgus do seem to meet at an important point: the matter of the family. Machiavelli scrubs the family, which Polybius found to be so essential, from Roman history, implying that the family might in some way restrain desires and work in opposition to his reading of Roman history. The aspiring prince, in any case, should not be concerned with the family because Machiavelli himself is not. Lycurgus intentionally diminished the Spartans’ attachment to family by giving “every father authority over other men’s children as well as over his own. When a man knows that fathers have this power, he is bound to rule the children over whom he exercises authority as he would wish his own to be ruled.” Children, Plutarch tells us, were raised in common. So, for Lycurgus the family had to be made more public so that the private sphere might not come to harm the city. Thus, the family in some way seems to interfere with both the private pursuit of glory and the public austerity and exaltation of the city. It promotes Machiavelli’s dreaded middle way. Despite the argument, made by Polybius and others, that full dedication to the family was the very cause of Rome’s glory, Machiavelli ignores it in his account because it might interfere with the individual pursuit of glory–man might be divided against himself in an attempt to be selfless. Lycurgus likewise subordinates the family because it could ostensibly threaten one’s wholescale devotion to the good of the city. In both instances, the family divides man against those things to which he ought to be wholly devoted–himself or the city.
In order to further promote a subordination of desire to the common good, “Lycurgus forbade freeborn citizens to have anything to do with business affairs. He insisted on their regarding as their own concern only those activities that make for civic freedom.” He sought to subordinate the desiring part of the soul in all respects, allowing it no outlet, but demanding that it be ruled by the other parts. The subordination of desire is, for Lycurgus, essential to civic freedom because, again, the polis must not divide man against himself; the good of the city and his own good must be understood to be one.
Machiavelli opposes this outright; for having the ability to acquire for the sake of glory is the very purpose of political life, and political life is the most valid sort of life. Politics separated from necessity and acquisition is incoherent. Thus, an aspiring prince must chance infamy in a bold attempt to attain glory. All aspiring princes act in such a manner, so to reject such a mode of action is to admit failure, to attempt the middle way. Politics must be realistic: a prince must realize that public deliberation is a sham and a mere front for the true way of political life, which is the clashing of ferocious appetites, one against the other. The best sort of political regime is that which attains a succession of good princes, each willing to be wholly evil. In this self-interested way, one can act for the sake of the common good. In the good regime institutions must arrange men so that ambitions can counteract each other. The appetites of princes must be curbed only by younger and greater men and by institutions which force the old into retirement; elections must prevail. Machiavelli’s preference for the young collides with Lycurgus’ demand that the old retain positions of political authority.
Rome as a Model of Political Virtù
Rousseau writes in his Emile that “Lycurgus denatured [the heart of man].” He sought to educate man via harsh institutions, ultimately reconciling public and private good via the subordination of all private matters to public matters. Rousseau rejects Lycurgus’ rulership on the grounds that he did not understand the source of evil among men; as a result, he sought to stifle man’s natural goodness; for “[e]verything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Men by nature desire good, and only by the failures of civilization do those desires become corrupted. For Machiavelli, goodness as such is a myth. The meek and humble on Earth are just as greedy and lustful for gain as anybody else; they simply seek to acquire land and glory in the city of God rather than the city of man.
Yet Machiavelli might agree with the notion that Lycurgus denatured men: for Machiavelli, it is essential to understand the acquisitive, ambitious, and individualistic nature of man as his animating principle. In fact, this is the extent of man’s nature; he is nothing more. His instincts for self-preservation and acquisition are the sum of human existence, and to act otherwise is delusion. In Aristotelian terms, Machiavelli might drop the rational from Aristotle’s rational animal–insofar as Aristotle is alluding to contemplative thought–leaving for desire the pride of place in man’s soul, served by calculative rationality. In his extraction of reason from the life of man, Machiavelli eliminates the essential part of man’s shared life, the logos, the thing that would make him characteristically man. Man, then, is a desiring animal, alone and desperate for self-preservation, and the idea of the common good defined as anything more than shared glory or preservation is irrelevant to human endeavor. Other men must be judged by this standard: how useful they are depends solely on whether they help one achieve self-preservation, acquire lands, or gain glory – the means by which man might conquer fortune and achieve some form of immortality.
Rome, not Sparta, then, is Machiavelli’s model of virtù. For Sparta was limited; it aimed at the preservation of the city via the subordination of man’s desires and political ambitions. Lycurgues misunderstood man, and thus Sparta did not expand or acquire. The Romans implicitly understood the true nature of man, aiming at expansion and conquest, at the conquering of fortune via virtuous and prudent political action in both domestic and foreign affairs.
So we might be skeptical of one who too proudly embraces Old Nick, fancying himself an aspiring prince. Such a man would be incapable of friendship in any noble sense; he would perpetually calculate in his pursuit of acquisition, living in a world of bargaining and neg-otium, of vanity and machination. For Machiavelli has engaged in a remarkable act of concealing man from himself in his pursuit of technical mastery.

NOTES:

[1] His account of Rome, however, is suspect, especially insofar as he entirely ignores the importance of the family and downplays the Roman religion as a farce, even in its republican years.
[2] See Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 9; Discourses on Livy, 1.4, 5. Broadly speaking, Machiavelli divides the city into the popolo, who lack political ambition and only desire not to be ruled, and the grandi, who want to dominate. Yet his distinction between these two humors is tentative; for he describes them by humors only — they do not hold true in all cases. In short, many among the popolo might be aspiring princes, and many among the grandi desire only not to be dominated.
[3] Though Machiavelli revises the family out of Livy’s history to further emphasize this point.
[4] Yet it is nevertheless clear that Machiavelli altered Livy’s history to give Rome a more populist flavor. Perhaps such an attempt might arise from his desire to reform a world in which Christianity had democratized many things, and would continue to do so.
[5] In any case, Machiavelli makes the distinction between Rome and Sparta clearer than it seemed to have been in reality.
[6] Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 1.4, p. 17; 1.44, p. 92. Machiavelli makes a general distinction between popolo and grandi, but he at several points shows the ways in which this distinction is not wholly adequate. His preference for the popolo ultimately can be reduced to the fact that “a multitude without a head is useless.”
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Jacob Bruns is a PhD student at Hillsdale College's School of Statesmanship. He has taught at several classical schools and holds a B.A. in Business from the University of Dallas, an M.A. in Humanities with a concentration in Classical Education from the University of Dallas, and an M.A. in Politics from Hillsdale College.

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