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Novelty and Nostalgia in Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Montaigne Eric Macphail

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Novelty and Nostalgia in Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Montaigne Eric Macphail Novelty and Nostalgia in Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Montaigne Eric MacPhail PRAISING THE PAST: NOVELTY AND NOSTALGIA IN MACHIAVELLI, CASTIGLIONE, AND MONTAIGNE ne of the commonplaces that the Renaissance inherited from antiquity Owas the idea, usually formulated as a complaint, that humans have a nat- ural tendency to praise the past and blame the present. This topos raises some interesting questions about the historical consciousness of the Renaissance since those who cite the topos ordinarily intend to vindicate the autonomy of the present even though the tendency they decry is taken to be intemporal and thus to link the past and the present in an undifferentiated extension of time. Moreover, the very antiquity of the theme complicates the distinction of past and present by endowing the past with its own internal division of past and present. Given the longevity of this topos, we can infer that the Ancients had their own cult of antiquity, which provoked the same blend of enthusiasm and impatience that Renaissance writers experienced as they looked back to the past. This retrospective regression is an important feature of the self- identity of Renaissance humanists, who in some respects distinguished themselves from their ancient models by fnding new ways to motivate the topos of praising the past. This paper proposes to examine how the classical commonplace of praising the past was variously appropriated and transformed by three promi- nent European prose writers of the sixteenth century: Niccolò Machiavelli, Baldassar Castiglione, and Michel de Montaigne. The choice of these three authors is neither exhaustive nor inevitable. They participate in a much larger dialogue of European vernacular and neo-Latin writers who respond to a well-established classical topos. Together, they do not represent any coherent movement or fashion in the large domain of Renaissance historical thought, a domain that has been keenly assessed by a host of eminent specialists.1 The internal coherence of this grouping of three is partially motivated by the reading habits of Montaigne, who certainly knew 1. Rather than dutifully record all the secondary literature on the subject, I refer, for the sake of expediency, to one of the most up-to-date and ingenious surveys of Renaissance historical thought, namely, Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). Grafton’s bibliography of secondary sources is both thorough and ecumenical. The Romanic Review Volume 101 Number 4 © The Trustees of Columbia University RomanicReview_101i04.indb 639 3/19/12 12:34 PM 640 Eric MacPhail the work of Machiavelli and Castiglione and responded with great interest but little empathy to both of them. However, the present study is not intended to confrm Montaigne’s role as a reader of Machiavelli and Castiglione.2 Rather, it means to document what might be called the creativity of a commonplace. Among them, our three authors discover a surprisingly fexible range of mean- ings in the apparently simple and common impulse to resent the prestige of the past. They also recuperate certain common intertexts from classical literature that merit a preliminary inspection. We can fnd the topos of praising the past in an impressive array of clas- sical authors, usually those who championed a new aesthetic movement or simply those who resented the conservatism of their contemporaries. In this respect, the most characteristic uses can be found in the Latin poet Horace, who frequently deplores the conservative tastes of his compatriots. Horace can be said to have named this venerable topos in the Ars poetica when he refers to the comic fgure of the “laudator temporis acti se puero,” or the old man who praises the time of his youth (173–74). He develops and expands this theme of temporal prejudice in his verse epistle to Emperor Augustus, where he dissects the typical Roman intolerance of novelty. Here the poet complains that the only new thing that the Roman people admire is their emperor, for otherwise they cannot abide anything that is not remote from them in time or place (Epistles 2.1.18–22). Here, the target of satire is not the nostalgic old man of the Ars poetica but the reading public itself, described as a partisan of the Ancients, or “fautor veterum” (2.1.23), who measures quality by age, “vir- tutem aestimat annis” (2.1.48), and oppresses modern authors with his envy: “Nos nostraque lividus odit” (2.1.89). If it is true that the best works of the Greeks are their earliest, the same is not true of the Romans (2.1.28–30), who improved considerably once they learned to imitate the Greeks (2.1.156–67). In this way, Horace opens up the possibility of progress in literary history, especially imitative progress, which is the type of composite ideal—looking both backward in veneration and forward in anticipation—that will appeal to the Renaissance. While Horace is concerned with literary precedence and the evolution of taste, the ancient historians devoted their attention to the historiographic 2. This task has been accomplished by Marcel Tétel, Présences italiennes dans les Essais de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 1992) and Nicola Panichi, I vincoli del disinganno: Per una nuova interpretazione di Montaigne (Florence: Olschki, 2004). For further bibliography, see Panichi 113 (Machiavelli and Montaigne) and 265 (Castiglione and Montaigne). To the latter list can be added Eric MacPhail, “Living in the Past: Montaigne and the Critique of Novelty,” Esprit généreux, esprit pantagruélicque. Essays by His Students in Honor of François Rigolot, eds. Reinier Leushuis and Zahi Zalloua (Geneva: Droz, 2008) 247–58. RomanicReview_101i04.indb 640 3/19/12 12:34 PM Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Montaigne 641 problem of praising the past. Thucydides inaugurates his history with the claim that the Peloponnesian War was the greatest event in Greek history (1.1.2), more worthy of memory than any that came before it (1.1.1). And though he recognizes the limits to our knowledge of the past, he is neverthe- less convinced that those who lived before his time achieved nothing great in war or otherwise (1.1.3). In fact, he betrays some impatience toward those who would contest the preeminence of the present: “As for this present war, even though people are apt to think that the war in which they are fghting is the greatest of all wars and, when it is over, to relapse again into their admi- ration of the past, nevertheless, if one looks at the facts themselves, one will see that this was the greatest war of all” (1.21.2).3 Here, Thucydides singles out two forms of temporal bias, the subjective preoccupation with one’s own immediate experience and the overriding impulse to admire the past, both of which inhibit a just appreciation of the new. Elsewhere, Thucydides has Pericles admonish the audience of his famous epitaphios, or funeral oration, that they will have diffculty matching the reputation of their fallen broth- ers, since people are naturally inclined to envy the living and honor the dead (2.45.1). Machiavelli retains this lesson when he takes up the topic of praising the past in his Discorsi. And yet, for all his preliminary insistence on the superiority of the present, Thucydides is equally known for his belief in the constancy of human nature and the recurrence of human events, two themes that tend to neutralize the priority of the present and even to relativize any distinction between new and old. The locus classicus of this belief is the passage where the author declares that he will be satisfed if his work is judged useful by those who want to have a clear understanding of what has happened in the past and what will happen again in the future in the same or a similar way according to the regularity of human affairs (1.22.4).4 This notion of recurrence qualifes all the superla- tives used to describe the Peloponnesian War, for recurrent events cannot be unprecedented. Why should we give priority to the present if we recognize recurrence? Indeed, why prefer either past or present? This relativism, implicit in Thucydides’s logic, becomes explicit in Montaigne’s essays. 3. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin, 1954) 24. The standard Renaissance reading of this passage, in Lorenzo Valla’s version, is as follows: “Et licet homines praesens bellum in quo versantur semper maximum iudicent, eoque fnito, vetera vehementius admirentur, tamen hoc bellum, animadvertentibus, ex ipsis operibus maius illis se extitisse ostendet.” From the edition of Henri Estienne (Geneva, 1588) 15. 4. For a discussion of this passage and an inventory of similar passages, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1972) 29–33. RomanicReview_101i04.indb 641 3/19/12 12:34 PM 642 Eric MacPhail The ancient historian who gives the most lapidary expression to the topos of praising the past is Velleius Paterculus, who compresses the history of the world into the narrow confnes of his Historiarum libri duo. Near the end of the second book, which culminates in a panegyric to emperor Tiberius, the author pauses to praise Gaius Sentius Saturninus, consul in 19 bc, who gov- erned “vetere consulum more” (2.92.2). So scrupulous was his administration that Paterculus would judge his achievement comparable to the glory of the consuls of old, were it not for that natural tendency to prefer the past to the present: “nisi quod naturaliter audita visis laudamus libentius et praesentia invidia, praeterita veneratione prosequimur” (2.92.5). While the phrase is well turned, its logic is less than perspicuous since, in fact, Velleius is rarely deterred from praising the present, whether in the fgure of his near contemporary Sentius, or in his own career as a soldier and a magistrate in the service of Tiberius.
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