MACHIAVELLI, THUCYDIDES, AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION

William E. Klein

At the heart of Machiavelli’s celebration of the erceness with which free ancient peoples sought vengeance against those who would take away (or had taken away) their liberty is a slightly misremembered story from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War about Corcyran democrats massacring their traitorous betters (Discourses, II.2). Despite a long-standing interest in generic connections between both writers’ realistic portrayal of power politics,1 this and other seemingly vague references to the war have prompted the plausible view that Machia- velli did not think very seriously about Thucydides’ speci c treatment of these stories.2 But a recent study by Marcello Simonetta of the “somiglianze esteriori” (super cial similarities) and “le analogie intime, di pensiero e di stile” (close analogies in thought and style) between the writings of these two realists3 has con rmed my own feeling that Machiavelli’s debt to Thucydides was deep, if far from straightforward, and in keeping with a largely unexplored impact going back to the rst appearance of Valla’s translation of Thucydides in 1450–52.4 Recent scholarship on Thucydides that focuses precisely on the central signi cance of the Corcyran massacre for Thucydides’ understanding of civil war as a theater for stasis (a speci c type of disorienting social dysfunction that for Thucydides was not con ned to local communities

1 See references in Gennaro Sasso, Studi su Machiavelli (Morano: Napoli, 1967), note 40, 57. 2 Peter Bondanella, Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 15–17. For some places in which Machiavelli seems to call on Thucydides, see Leslie J. Walker’s translation and commentary of The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli (New York: Routledge, 1975), Table XIII.A.11, 285–6. 3 Marcello Simonetta, “Machiavelli Lettore di Tucidide,” Esperienze Letterarie, Vol 22 (1997), 55. 4 For a suggestion of this impact on Poggio Bracciolini, see Frederick Krantz, “Between Bruni and Machiavelli: History, Law and Historicism in Poggio Bracciolini,” in Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob, eds., Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 143. 390 william e. klein but spread throughout Hellas) further suggests that Machiavelli’s inter- est in the event can be taken to be rather pregnant. And this in turn opens up the possibility that early modern readers familiar with both Machiavelli and Thucydides could well have judged the Florentine’s jarring message in the context of the classic understanding of stasis and other Thucydidean themes—that is, as a deliberate perversion of Thucydides’ message.5 This nally will lead to the suggestion that the emergence of mature political analysis in the Whig tradition leading up the American Revolution, especially in the thought of Algernon Sidney, was very much indebted to this speci c form of Machiavelli’s insightful perversion, even if it ltered out a great many of the nuances. While considering the possibility that this happened, I will be unable to avoid tentatively suggesting my own reading of Machiavelli’s complex and uid relationship to Thucydides. There are signs that Machiavelli’s way of reading Thucydides—or at least of thinking about the Greek historian’s main protagonists, Athens and Sparta—became somewhat disturbed between the writing of the rst and second books of the Discourses.6 Early in the rst book, Machia- velli establishes Sparta as a model of the mixed non-expanding regime. Lycurgus is not only as positive a mythic founder as Moses and Solon (I.9), but he “organized his laws in Sparta in such a way that, allocat- ing to the kings, the aristocrats, and the people their respective roles, he created a state that lasted for more than 800 years, resulting in the highest praise for him and in tranquility for that city” (I.2).7 In contrast, because Solon did not institute the mixed form, democratic Athens was unstable and collapsed prematurely. Further, in I.5 Machiavelli shows clearly that the nobles of Sparta, like those of Venice, could act as the guardians of liberty, even though he nally promotes democratic guardianship in an expanding mixed republic. This simple scheme could have provided a benign foundation for a discussion in Book II of

5 This seems to be in line with Quentin Skinner’s understanding of Machiavelli’s originality with respect to the Roman republican tradition he “subverts,” in “Republican virtues in an age of princes,” in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Vol II, Renaissance Virtues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154. 6 This could be consistent with Sasso’s critique of Hans Baron’s dating of The Prince in relation to The Discourses, in Sasso, Studi su Machiavelli, 23. I will follow him in focus- ing on Discourses I.18 as a pivot, but I will make no claim to have contributed to the solution of the chronological problem. 7 Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, trans. and ed., Discourses on Livy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 26. This is the edition I will cite throughout.