A WORLD WITHOUT A SAVING GRACE:

GLORY AND IMMORTALITY IN MACHIAVELLI1

Hillay Zmora2

Abstract: Glory in Machiavelli is an ultimate value. Despite its conceptual central-

ity, his notion of glory has received relatively little scholarly attention. This article
seeks to go beyond the common interpretation that Machiavelli conceived of glory as a
means to harmonize man’s inexorable selfish ambition with the public interest. It
addresses the theoretically prior question of why Machiavelli expected that the uncer-
tain hopes for glory would prevail over more immediate human appetites and thus
serve the construction of a good political order. The article argues that Machiavelli
presented the human world as miserable yet simultaneously denied mankind any
outlet by systematically severing the threads with which men sought to connect to
eternity. Foreclosing in particular the Christian promise of after-life, Machiavelli
impresses upon the capable few the only path (he leaves open) towards transcending a
degraded world: the path to immortal glory. The human condition thus serves as the
basis for dealing with the fundamental political problem.

The force of Machiavelli’s political thought derives in large part from the
extreme tension it posits between human nature and human society: humans
for Machiavelli are by nature wicked, ambitious, selfish; but human society
requires co-operation and even a degree of altruism. This ‘vision of a world in
which rational brutes must reach the common good’ was, as Sebastian de
Grazia has pointed out, a major contribution to political philosophy.3 Set
against ancient political philosophy, the contrast appears particularly stark,
the innovation emphatically radical.4 If for Aristotle the objective of the state
was to enable men to realize their human potential, for Machiavelli it is to pre-

1 References in English are to The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago,

1985); The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s Discourses & Guicciardini’s Consider-
ations, trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb, IL, 2002); Florentine Histories,
trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield (Princeton, 1988); Mandragola, in The
Comedies of Machiavelli: The Women from Andros, The Mandrake, Clizia, ed. and trans.
David Sices and James B. Atkinson (Hanover and London, 1985), pp. 153–275. References
in English to other works are to Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan
Gilbert (3 vols., Durham, NC, 1965; repr. 1989), hereafter cited as Chief Works. Unless
otherwise noted, all references in Italian are to the Einaudi-Gallimard edition: Opere, ed.
Corrado Vivanti (3 vols., Turin, 1997–2005).
2 Department of General History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, POB 653,
Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. Email: hzmora@bgu.ac.il
3 Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, 1989), p. 270.
4 Cf. Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago, 1996), esp. p. 273;
Markus Fischer, Well-Ordered License: On the Unity of Machiavelli’s Thought (Lanham,
MD, 2000), pp. 23, 39–40, 63, 147.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVIII. No. 3. Autumn 2007.

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450 H. ZMORA

vent them from doing so.5 No thinker prior to Machiavelli presented the rela-
tion between the public good and the private good in terms of such elemental
incongruity, let alone attempted to reconcile two so incompatible proposi-
tions. One of the chief resources identified by Machiavelli as suitable for
enabling men to overcome this deleterious contrariety is the human appetite
for glory.6
Given the importance which ‘glory’ consequently assumes in Machia-
velli’s thought, it is striking that the concept has received relatively little
scholarly attention.7 All the same, the few who have seriously studied
Machiavelli’s notion of glory have come to comparable conclusions as to its
role in his overall view of political life. Different emphases apart, they essen-
tially agree that Machiavelli conceived of glory as a means to convert the nat-
ural vice of selfish ambition into a public benefit. Machiavelli maintained that
‘the end that each [man] has before him [is] glory and riches’.8 But while both
are objects of selfish desire, it is a defining attribute of glory that it is a ‘medi-
ated acquisition’:9 it turns on the recognition and approbation of one’s fellow
men. As Leo Strauss put it
The desire for perpetual and immortal glory . . . [is] the only selfish desire
which can induce men to be passionately concerned with the well-being of
remote posterity. The desire for such glory is the link between badness and
goodness, since while it is selfish in itself it cannot be satisfied except by the
greatest possible service to others.10
While the desire for glory is in and of itself nothing other than a manifestation
of human nature, it does lend itself to manipulation by the art of politics for

5 Discourses, I.3, I.42.

6 Glory was of course a familiar Humanist theme (see Alberto Tenenti, Il senso della
morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1957), pp. 21–43). As will become
clear, Machiavelli gave it a different meaning (see Carlo Varotti, Gloria e ambizione
politica nel Rinascimento: da Petrarca a Machiavelli (Milan, 1998), p. 427 n. 155). An
intriguing question is whether his thinking on glory as a political good was influenced by
reading in Thucydides. For a superb discussion of the political import of the idea of glory
in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, see Michael Palmer, Love of Glory and the Common Good:
Aspects of the Political Thought of Thucydides (Lanham, MD, 1992), pp. 1–42. On
Machiavelli’s acquaintance with Thucydides see Luciano Canfora, ‘Tucidide e Machiavelli’,
Rinascimento, 37 (1997), pp. 29–44.
7 The works cited in the paragraph that follows are, as far as I know, the main system-
atic discussions of Machiavelli’s concept of glory. See also Russell Price, ‘The Theme of
Gloria in Machiavelli’, Renaissance Quarterly, 30 (1977), pp. 588–631.
8 The Prince, 25 (p. 99).
9 Dan Eldar, ‘Glory and the Boundaries of Public Morality in Machiavelli’s Thought’,
History of Political Thought, VII (1986), pp. 419–38, at p. 422.
10 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago, 1958), p. 286. See also ibid.,
pp. 281–2.

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 A WORLD WITHOUT A SAVING GRACE 451

the purposes of turning human nature to socially good account.11 A well used
desire for glory can serve to harmonize the private good and the common-
weal.12 Glory in Machiavelli, then, acts as a check, a ‘regulator’ (regola) and a
stimulus:13 it provides an outlet for personal ambition; it restrains individual
behaviour by setting norms whose breach is penalized by the denial of glory;14
and, conversely, it induces and animates constructive action by promising
immortality.15
The last point is of crucial importance. As modern interpreters have recog-
nized, the promise of immortality is indeed central to Machiavelli’s concept
of glory.16 For if the desire for glory is essential for a good political order, the
promise of immortality is essential in whetting that desire. Yet the available
interpretations tend to overlook the fundamental problems which this linkage
involves. In his writings Machiavelli stressed human passions and proclivities
which run counter to, and might well win out over, the desire for glory. Given
the implications this has for the prospects of creating and maintaining a good
political order, it is necessary to see how, if at all, he justified his trust in
‘glory’. Not untypically, Machiavelli did not provide a well reasoned, explicit
grounding of his concept of glory, in its complex relation to the quest for
immortality and to other, conflicting, human motivations. However, and this
is a main aim of the present study, it can be shown that such a grounding does
exist in Machiavelli’s oeuvre, though in a scattered fashion, obliquely articu-
lated and not primarily in the political books. The latter contain assertions
about the nexus between the desires for glory and immortality, but no corre-
sponding efforts to secure their ‘philosophical’ basis. They also contain an
impressive array of statements about the human psychological structure that
ostensibly render his assertions about glory incoherent. A resolution of this
twofold difficulty requires widening the scope of the inquiry to consider also

11 Cf. Eldar, ‘Glory and the Boundaries of Public Morality’, pp. 425–6.
12 Victor A. Santi, La ‘gloria’ nel pensiero di Machiavelli (Ravenna, 1979), p. 126.
13 Discourses, II.33 (p. 256): ‘That is why [the Senate] wanted the Consul to act on
his own and for the glory to be entirely his; they deemed that his love of it would be a
check and a regulator [regola] to make him do the right thing.’
14 The best (and best-known) example given by Machiavelli of such a denial, though
one which he himself did not necessarily endorse, is Agathocles. See The Prince, 8. Pat-
rick Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans: Liberty and Greatness in the Discourses on Livy
(Lanham, MD, 1999), pp. 233–6; Eldar, ‘Glory and the Boundaries of Public Morality’,
pp. 429–31; Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’œuvre: Machiavel (Paris, 1972), pp. 375–81;
A. D’Andrea, ‘La perplessità di Machiavelli: Agatocle o della “via scellerata e nefaria”
(Principe VIII)’, in Strutture inquiete: Premesse teoriche e verifiche storico-letterarie
(Florence, 1993), pp. 109–28; Victoria Kahn, ‘Virtù and the Example of Agathocles in
Machiavelli’s Prince’, in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell
Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 195–217.
15 Santi, La ‘gloria’ nel pensiero di Machiavelli, pp. 98, 104, 106–7.
16 See notes 17 and 21, below.

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some of Machiavelli’s literary texts. These were not, of course, chiefly con-
cerned with laying the theoretical foundations of the concept of glory con-
veyed by the political writings. However, since Machiavelli’s understanding
of the desire for glory ultimately rests on a set of attitudes to, or a general out-
look on, the human condition, such literary texts as express his world-view
constitute a privileged locus for an examination of the problem of glory in
Machiavelli.

***
On several occasions Machiavelli suggested that while glory is the prize for
certain political or military accomplishments, immortality is the underlying
motive. He assumed people to be almost instinctively amenable to the argu-
ment that glory guarantees a kind of immortality, an everlasting fame or
remembrance.17 In the proem of Florentine Histories, Machiavelli faulted
Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini for failing, in their histories of Flor-
ence, to appreciate correctly ‘the ambition of men and the desire they have to
perpetuate the name of their ancestors as well as their own: nor did they
remember that many who have not had the opportunity to acquire fame
through some praiseworthy deed have contrived to acquire it with despicable
things’.18 Even more directly indicative of Machiavelli’s assumptions are two
dispatches which he sent during Florence’s campaign against Pisa and the
accompanying conflict with Venice. In December 1498 the Secretary wrote to
the Florentine commissioners in the field and assured them that bringing the
war to a successful conclusion would result in the ‘tranquillity of this city and
in so much glory to those captains that will make them immortal forever’.19 A
few weeks later, in a letter to the commissioners, he urged them to exhort the
soldiers ‘not to lose this opportunity, and to use appropriately this victory to
which Fortuna has led them: because they may well never again be presented
with [the opportunity] to gain immortal glory such as presented itself this
time’.20 Machiavelli clearly accords the desire for glory pride of place in
men’s motivational system. ‘The desire for glory as the desire for eternal
17 Eldar, ‘Glory and the Boundaries of Public Morality’, p. 426.
18 Florentine Histories, Pr. (p. 7).
19 Machiavelli to Luca degli Albizi and the other commissioners, n.d. [probably 18
December], in Legazioni. Commissarie. Scritti di governo, ed. Jean-Jacques Marchand,
Vol. 1 (Rome, 2002), no. 102, p. 174 (‘. . . e in brevi ultimare questa guerra, donde debbe
nascere el riposo di questa città e tanta gloria a cotesti signori capitani che gli farà per tutti
e’ seculi immortali’).
20 Machiavelli to the commissioners general at the camp in the Casentino, 26 January
1499, in Legazioni. Commissarie, ed. Marchand, Vol. 1, no. 125, p. 200 (‘. . . vi esortiamo
ad esortare cotesti soldati a non perdere questa occasione, e volere usare questa vittoria
felicemente che la Fortuna ha parata loro innanzi: perché forse per tutti e’ tempi futuri
non si apparecchierà loro di potersi partorire immortale gloria quanto s’è a questa volta
apparecchiata’).

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 A WORLD WITHOUT A SAVING GRACE 453

glory,’ noted Strauss, ‘liberates man from the concern with life and property,
with goods which may have to be sacrificed for the common good; and yet
glory is a man’s own good.’21 In other words, men will be prepared to defer or
even forgo the satisfaction of other selfish desires in order to win the glory
that confers mnemonic immortality.
But in identifying the human will to evade mortality as the mainspring of
the desire for glory, which can then be employed in the general interest, more
pressing questions are raised than answered. To begin with, man in Machia-
velli is essentially a creature of the passions. Men are so constituted as to
desire more than they are able to achieve; and ‘since desire is always greater
than the power to acquire, the result is discontent and dissatisfaction with
what we have’.22 Intractable ambition is ever present, no matter what goods
men manage to obtain or what station in life they manage to attain.23 ‘Men rise
from one ambition to another’, is the judgment pronounced in one chapter
heading in the Discourses.24 What reason they do possess is servant rather
than master of the passions — a practical tool for the realization of those
asocial, selfish ends determined by ambition and imagination.25 Accordingly,
foresight and the ability to delay gratification are uncommon qualities. Men
‘are impatient and cannot put off for any length of time something they
covet’.26 The attraction exercised by concrete, immediately available goods is
considerably stronger than that exercised by goods as intangible, distant and
uncertain as glory and fame after death. It is far from self-evident, then, that
men would not be more allured by the hope for power and wealth than by the
prospects of glory.
Thus, if the idea of glory encapsulates a political project designed to counter-
act selfish human nature, then the difficulties it faces, by Machiavelli’s own
account, appear overwhelming to the point of despair. Indeed, one encounters
Machiavelli’s own doubts at the end of that cluster of chapters at the beginning

21 Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 282. See also ibid., p. 286: ‘The desire for
immortal glory . . . liberates men . . . from the fear of death. ’
22 Discourses, I.37 (p. 105). See also ibid., II.20 (p. 220).
23 Ibid., I.29 (p. 91); Tercets on Ambition, lines 70–9 (Opere, III, p. 45).
24 Discourses, I.46 (p. 124).
25 Paul A. Rahe, ‘Situating Machiavelli’, in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reap-
praisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (New York, 2000), pp. 270–309, at
pp. 293–4; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the
American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1992), pp. 265–6; Fischer, Well-Ordered License,
pp. 23–4, 71; de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, pp. 269–70; Herfried Münkler, Machiavelli:
Die Begründung des politischen Denkens der Neuzeit aus der Krise der Republik Florenz
(Frankfurt, 1982), pp. 263–4.
26 Discourses, III.8 (p. 294). See also ibid., II.20 (p. 220): ‘But men’s ambition is so
great that in order to satisfy an immediate desire they do not consider what evil may soon
result from it.’ In The Art of War, IV (Opere, I, p. 625), Machiavelli went so far as to
claim that soldiers’ love of booty is strong enough to offset fear of death in battle.

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454 H. ZMORA

of the Discourses in which he outlines his theory of vivere politico. In the

tenth chapter Machiavelli places his faith in the authority of glory:
If a prince truly seeks worldly glory, he ought to seek to possess a corrupted
city not in order to destroy it completely like Caesar but to restore it to order
like Romulus. And truly the heavens can bestow no greater opportunity for
glory on men, and men can desire no greater one . . . In conclusion, let those
on whom the heavens bestow such an opportunity consider that there are
two paths open to them: one makes them secure while living and gives them
glory after their death; the other makes them constantly anxious while they
are living and grants them sempiternal infamy after their death.27
Yet, by the eighteenth chapter, a sombre mood had set in: corruption, rather
than representing an opportunity, is now regarded as effectively a terminal
state. And while extraordinarily forceful measures can restore a politically
decaying society, such an enterprise is vitiated by a vicious dilemma: only an
evil man will have the stomach for committing such cruelties as are ineluctably
called for in order to become a prince of a corrupt body politic.
For this reason, we find it seldom happens that a good man seeks to become
a prince through evil means even though his aim be good or that an evil
man, once he has become prince, seeks to do good, since it never enters his
mind to use for good the power he has acquired wickedly.28
Attracted by the lure of power (and riches), human nature surges up and car-
ries everything before it, including the promise of genuine glory.29 By now it
should be obvious that, while it is correct to say that Machiavelli did expect
men of virtù to consider glory as an overriding objective, to leave the matter at
that is to conclude the investigation exactly at the point where explanation
should begin.

***
To be of any effectiveness and fulfil the political functions assigned to it by
Machiavelli, the desire for glory must be impelled by impulses whose force
equals or exceeds man’s other, more instant appetites. But these countervail-
ing impulses cannot emanate from a different, uncorrupted region of the
human psyche. Man in Machiavelli is not tragically divided between base
instincts and noble intellect, body and soul, reason and emotion. The anthropo-
logical pessimism that informed his teaching was sweeping as well as deep-
seated.30 The sources of the desire for glory must be sought within one and the
27 Discourses, I.10 (p. 54 [with slight emendation]).
28 Discourses, I.18 (p. 75).
29 See Varotti, Gloria e ambizione politica, pp. 426–8. See also Fischer, Well-Ordered
License, pp. 23, 69–70, 101.
30 Stelio Zeppi, ‘Il pessimismo antropologico nel Machiavelli del periodo anteriore
ai “Discorsi” ’, Filosofia politica, 6 (1992), pp. 193–242; August Buck, ‘Die Krise des

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 A WORLD WITHOUT A SAVING GRACE 455

same human nature which he described as ‘insatiable, arrogant, crafty, and

shifting, and above all else malignant, iniquitous, violent, and savage’.31
As has already been indicated, most revealing of the link between Machia-
velli’s disconsolate view of human existence and his expectation that men
would nevertheless prefer glory to mundane, material goods are literary texts
which are not immediately concerned with political remedies to the problems
entailed by human nature. Indeed, in these texts glory is not celebrated in the
least. In Machiavelli’s comedies, Victor Santi has observed, ‘glory’ is not
mentioned at all.32 But they are nonetheless especially useful because they
probe freely and directly fundamental attitudes to human life that, in the
political works, are present only in the background or as aphoristically articu-
lated assumptions. An examination of three literary pieces, all written around
1518, will suggest why the pursuit of glory, for all the sacrifices it involves, is
actually a plausible concomitant of the very wretchedness and wickedness of
the human condition. Precisely the bleakness of Machiavelli’s vision of
human life underlies his expectation and exhortation that men, for all their
sovereign passions and servile reason, should esteem glory even to the point
of risking their life in striving for it.33 It is the misery and anxiety inherent in
human existence, expressed by Machiavelli with merciless literary
mordacity, that provide the ground on which the desire for glory can thrive
and sustain a vigorous political order.

***
Written sometime between 1518 and 1520, the fable Belfagor is a biting satire
on humanity. The story begins with the complaints of the damned souls of the
‘miserable mortals’ to the effect that they had been consigned to Hell for no
other reason than having taken a wife. This startling accusation against the
female sex is reported to Pluto, the ruler of Hell, who convokes a council of
the princes of the netherworld in order to establish the truth. In his opening
address he declares that
even though by Heaven’s decrees and by decision of Fate, entirely beyond
repeal, I possess this kingdom, and for it I cannot be under obligation to any
judgment, either heavenly or earthly, yet, since it is the highest prudence for
those who are most powerful to be most subject to the laws and most to
esteem the judgment of others, I have determined, in an affair that might

humanistischen Menschenbildes bei Machiavelli’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren
Sprachen, 189 (1953), pp. 304–17, repr. in August Buck, Die humanistische Tradition in der
Romania (Bad Homburg vdH, 1968), pp. 271–84; Münkler, Machiavelli, pp. 262–71. Of a
different opinion is Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli (2 vols., Bologna, 3rd edn., 1993),
I, pp. 455–68.
31 Tercets on Ambition, lines 55–7 (Chief Works, II, p. 736).
32 Santi, La ‘gloria’ nel pensiero di Machiavelli, pp. 14, 16.
33 Cf. nn. 19–20 above. See also Fischer, Well-Ordered License, p. 59.

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456 H. ZMORA

result in some shame to our empire, to get your advice on how I ought to
conduct myself.34
The consultation resulted in a decision to select by lot one of their number and
send him to the world. The mission was entrusted to the archdevil Belfagor.
He was to assume human form and, with a copious expense account at his dis-
posal, to take a wife; after ten years of living with her he was to simulate his
own death, return to Hell and ‘testify to his superiors on the burdens and
annoyances of marriage’.35 During this decade, it was further laid down in
council, Belfagor should be subject to all the afflictions that bedevil men,
such as poverty, imprisonment, sickness and the like misfortunes; unless, that
is, he could elude them by using deception and cunning.
Belfagor arrives in Florence, accompanied by a retinue of devils, and under
false identity marries the beautiful and portentously named Onesta Donati. As
Belfagor soon finds out, the lady is more than his match. Once she realizes he
is in love with her, she browbeats him into footing the bill for her expensive
tastes. Her pride, he learns, is greater than that of his colleague Lucifer. Her
desire to excel and outdo all others in the social game of lavish display costs
him a fortune. He also indulges her demands that he help her father and broth-
ers make ends meet. Yet all his generosity in satisfying her every wish and
whim fail to buy him domestic peace. His attendant demons are soon so
demoralized by her overbearing manner that they flee back to Hell. Then he
runs out of money and, pestered by debtors, he too is forced to make away in
haste. Only after some further misadventures does he manage to return to the
safety of Hell.
Belfagor is truly a blasphemous world-turned-upside-down. To begin with,
unlike Earth, Hell enjoys a good political order. If ‘a prince who can do as he
pleases is mad’,36 then Pluto is an exemplary prince: although he can do as he
pleases, he forbears from acting in an absolutist manner. In addition, he and
his political élite show concern for justice and truth.37 That much cannot be
said of the human world. As Belfagor experiences it, the human world is ruled
by irrational, low passions rather than lofty reason, by haughtiness and osten-
tation, cupidity and sheer malice. In such a world, even an archdevil cannot
find a place, and would choose to stay in his well-ordered Hell, a bastion of

34 Chief Works, II, pp. 869–70.

35 Ibid., p. 870.
36 Discourses, I.58 (p. 148).
37 Belfagor (Chief Works, II, p. 870). See Theodore A. Sumberg, ‘Belfagor: Machia-
velli’s Short Story’, Interpretation, 19 (1992), pp. 243–50, at p. 244; Filippo Grazzini,
Machiavelli narratore: Morfologia e ideologia della novella di Belfagor con il testo
della ‘Favola’ (Rome, 1990), pp. 16–19.

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good sense and rational conduct. The moral is plain: Hell is on Earth and the
real devil is man.38
Another literary visit by Machiavelli to an underworld results in similar yet
even more trenchant downgrading of human existence, this time effected by
dignifying animals rather than devils. The Ass, an autobiographically tinged,
unfinished allegorical poem composed also around 1518,39 performs this
inversion through a satire on Dante which violently rejects central tenets of
Christianity.40 Like Dante, who found himself in ‘a dark wood’,41 Machiavelli
recounts how he found himself ‘in as rough a place as ever I saw’.42 But
whereas Dante lost his way because he was in a state of sin, Machiavelli can-
not tell the cause of his ordeal. As it turns out, he is in the realm of Circe. He is
discovered and then guided by a woman of great beauty who herds a vast
number of humans-turned-animals. It is she who later reveals to him the ‘rea-
son’ of his misfortune:
Among modern peoples and among ancient . . . never has anyone borne
more ingratitude or greater toil. Through your own fault this did not over-
take you, as it happens to some, but because Chance (sorte) was opposed to
your good conduct. Chance closed upon you the gates of pity above all
when she led you into this place so savage and strong.43
Fortuna, then, is the sole author of the suffering of the protagonist. Nothing
indeed that happens in The Ass has to do with sin, nothing the result of any
moral failure or strength. Neither guilt nor merit determines man’s vicissi-
tudes. Time is an endless alternation of good and evil, and it stands to reason
that in this naturalistic scheme salvation has no place whatever.44 No world
but the human world is available for man; and in this world man is not only the

38 Francesco Bausi, Machiavelli (Rome, 2005), p. 300, quoting Michelangelo Picone,

‘La “Favola” di Machiavelli: una lettura intertestuale’, in Dal primato allo scacco: I
modelli narrativi italiani fra Trecento e Seicento, ed. Gian Mario Anselmi (Rome,
1998), pp. 171–90, at p. 190. See also Michelangelo Picone, ‘La favola di Belfagor fra
exemplum e novella’, in Niccolò Machiavelli: Politico, storico, letterato, ed. Jean-Jacques
Marchand (Rome, 1996), pp. 137–48, at pp. 148–9; Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, ‘La
malignità degli uomini e il fallimento del diavolo’, in Machiavelli o la scelta della letteratura
(Rome, 1987), pp. 207–12.
39 On the dating of the work, and the possibility that parts of it were written a few
years earlier, see Bausi, Machiavelli, pp. 145–7.
40 Gennaro Sasso, ‘L’Asino: una satira antidantesca’, in Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri
saggi, Vol. 4 (Milan, 1997), pp. 39–128. See also Paolo Fazion, ‘L’Asino da leggere’, in
Machiavelli, l’Asino e le bestie, ed. Gian Mario Anselmi and Paolo Fazion (Bologna,
1984), pp. 25–134.
41 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol. 1, Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M.
Durling (New York and Oxford, 1996), p. 27.
42 The Ass, 2 (Chief Works, II, p. 753).
43 Ibid., p. 757.
44 Sasso, ‘L’Asino’, pp. 58–9, 78–9.

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458 H. ZMORA

plaything of Nature, he is the victim of his own human nature as well. It is not
only that Fortuna tosses man up and then down at random; man’s own psy-
chological makeup is a central cause of the instability and flux that deny him
security and tranquillity. Such are the conclusions which the hero draws from
his lonely ruminations over ‘how Fortune often now caressed and now nipped
the ancient peoples, noble and famous’:
That which more than anything else throws kingdoms down
from the highest hills is this: that the powerful with their power are never
sated.
From this it results that they are discontented who have lost, and hatred is
stirred up to ruin the conquerors;
whence it comes about that one rises and the other dies; and the one who has
risen is ever tortured with new ambition and with fear.
This appetite destroys our states; and the greater wonder is that all recog-
nize this transgression, but no one flees from it.45
Human existence, governed by ambition and racked by anxiety, is intrinsi-
cally unhappy — unhappy for no other reason than that it is human. This is
what the protagonist hears at the end of the poetic journey from none other but
a muddy porker. Committing a condescending indiscretion by proposing to
the pig the possibility of re-assuming his erstwhile shape, he provokes the
lowly animal into launching a high-minded denunciation of human life:
I have no wish to live with you; I refuse.
Without the least doubts I assert and affirm that superior to yours is our con-
dition.
Who is that preceptor who explains to us what any plant is,
whether harmless or injurious? Not any research, not your ignorance.
You . . . go exploring one country
and another, not to find a climate either cool or sunny,
but because your shameful greed for gain does not confirm your spirit in a
life sparing, law-abiding and humble.
My talk would never come to an end if I should try to show how hapless you
are above all other earthly creatures.
We are closer friends to Nature; to us she more freely dispenses her vigour,
making you only beggars for all her good things.
Nature gave you hands and speech, and with them she gave you also ambi-
tion and avarice, with which her bounty is cancelled.
Yours are ambition, licentiousness, lamentation and avarice, which bring
on mange in the life you reckon so high.
One hog to another hog causes no pain, one stag to another;
man by another man is slain, crucified and plundered.
Consider now how you ask that I again become man, being exempt from all
the miseries that I endured as long as I was a man.

45 The Ass, 5 (Chief Works, II, p. 762).

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 A WORLD WITHOUT A SAVING GRACE 459

. . . in this mud I live more happily;

here without anxiety I bath and roll myself.46
The pig’s anti-humanist diatribe, as Gennaro Sasso has observed, is a
counterpart of the bitter natural and political conception expounded earlier in
The Ass, whereby human life is a ceaseless succession of good and evil which
man cannot control but which he makes worse by his ambition.47 There is no
escape from this world, no redemption. The pig in the fantasy may be able to
return to his human shape but does not want to; man may want to become an
unselfconscious, anxiety-free pig but in reality cannot.
It is this conclusion that may have forced Machiavelli to discontinue the
poem before the protagonist, transformed into an animal, could relate how
things look from the other side. For if the point of the poem is to denigrate the
human world by idealizing the animal kingdom, the pig’s speech inevitably
leads into a literary impasse: the anticipated metamorphosis of the protagonist
could not add anything of importance to the lessons already taught by the
pig.48 Hence perhaps the decision to abandon The Ass at this stage and move
on to the Mandragola, in which the bestiality of the human world is drama-
tized without recourse to allegory.49 Imbued with equally unmitigated anthro-
pological pessimism, the derogation of the human world in Mandragola is
accomplished with the skill and mocking creativity of a masterpiece.
The ‘tale named for the mandrake root’50 revolves around the desires of two
men: Callimaco and Nicia. Young Callimaco is consumed by an overpower-
ing passion to make love to gorgeous Lucrezia. Indeed, so much so that he
declares he ‘won’t stop at anything, no matter how brutal, cruel or foul’.51
Two main obstacles stand in his way: first, Lucrezia is married; secondly, she
is a virtuous lady. What nevertheless keeps Callimaco’s hope alive are several
salient facts about Lucrezia’s husband Nicia: a wealthy Doctor of Laws, he is
old, self-conceited and eminently stupid: ‘the simplest and most foolish man
in all Florence’.52 More promising still, for Callimaco’s designs, is the fact

46 Ibid., 8 (Chief Works, II, pp. 770–2).

47 Sasso, ‘L’Asino’, pp. 93–4. See also Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina, Chiesa e religione
in Machiavelli (Pisa–Rome, 1998), pp. 256–7 n. 378, who maintains that, in the discourse
of the pig, evil and sin are humanistic pride and distance from Nature.
48 Sasso, ‘L’Asino’, pp. 119–22; Corrado Vivanti, ‘Introduzione’ to L’Asino, in Opere,
III, pp. 762–67, at p. 766. On the question of interrupting The Ass see also Bausi,
Machiavelli, pp. 147–8.
49 Sasso, ‘L’Asino’, p. 122.
50 Mandragola, Prologue (p. 159).
51 Ibid., Act 1, Sc. 3 (p. 177).
52 Ibid., Act 1, Sc. 1 (p. 169). For an interpretative attempt to rehabilitate Nicia see
Harvey C. Mansfield, ‘The Cuckold in Machiavelli’s Mandragola’, in The Comedy and
Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works, ed. Vicky B. Sullivan (New
Haven, 2000), pp. 1–29.

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460 H. ZMORA

that Nicia, too, is consumed by a burning desire: He is ‘mad for begettin’’:53

‘I’m so anxious to have children,’ he says, ‘that I’m ready to do just about
anything.’54 His is a primordial craving: he is getting old, he fears approach-
ing death, and he wants to leave something behind him capable, as it were, of
continuing his being.55 Alas, he is incapable of impregnating Lucrezia. This
mixture of circumstances, personality traits and desires creates the perfect
opportunity for Callimaco to satisfy his own desire. Guided by the unscrupu-
lous ex-matchmaker Ligurio, and with the equally unconscionable complicity
of Lucrezia’s mother and Friar Timoteo, he puts into practice a plot that unites
him and Lucrezia in her marriage bed.
As in the story of Belfagor, Machiavelli presents in the Mandragola a
human world dominated by inferior appetites; and it is through stratagem and
deception that one attains the objects of these desires. The dramatis personae
that populate the stage are all petty, unkind, vulgar and small-minded. The
means they employ to accomplish their ends may be sophisticated and at
times even subtle, but the ends are trivial and vile. The human relations on
show are predominantly exploitative, driven by ambition and egoism; the
characters treat each other as means and objects. The world of Mandragola is
one where faith in one’s fellow men is not a social virtue but a source of weak-
ness and vulnerability. It pits not the good against the bad, but the devious
against the credulous; and there is no escape from this degraded world.
Indeed, none of the characters, least of all Friar Timoteo, is a serious believer;
their religion is limited to observing externalities. Fear of damnation is readily
laid to rest by casuistic rationalizations. Thus Callimaco, in a self-pitying
soliloquy, rebukes himself: ‘What are you doing? Have you gone mad: Even
if I do possess her, what then? . . . Don’t you know how little pleasure men
find in the things they desire, compared to what they expected?’ But he has his
answers ready: ‘the worst that can happen to you is to die and go off to Hell.
How many others have died! And how many excellent men have gone to Hell!
Why should you be ashamed to go there, too?’56
From this dishonest and unprincipled human universe not even the institu-
tion of the family provides a safe haven of love and trust.57 In fact, as in Clizia,
the family is itself an arena of power struggles and intrigues.58 It is impossible,
then, to withdraw from the world to a private sphere regulated by different
53 Ibid., Act 2, Song (p. 201).
54 Ibid., Act 1, Sc. 2 (p. 173). See also Act 1, Sc. 1 (p. 169); Act 2, Sc. 2 (p. 183).
55 Cf. Gennaro Sasso, ‘Considerazioni sulla “Mandragola” ’, in Machiavelli e gli antichi
e altri saggi, Vol. 3 (Milan, 1988), pp. 47–122, at p. 77.
56 Mandragola, Act 4, Sc. 1 (p. 231).
57 Cf. Mansfield, ‘The Cuckold’, p. 7. It is noteworthy in this respect that in his account
of the early development of human society in Discourses, I.2, which is based on Polybius,
Machiavelli omits the reference to the family as a ‘natural’ institution.
58 Martin Fleisher, ‘Trust and Deceit in Machiavelli’s Comedies’, Journal of the History
of Ideas, 27 (3) (1966), pp. 365–80, at pp. 370, 379–80.

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rules. Moreover, a quintessential function of the family, to ensure orderly

genetic continuity, is made fun of: not only is it the idiotic Nicia who embod-
ies this wish, but it is this wish in particular which exposes him to the machi-
nations of Callimaco. Nicia’s desire to secure some link to immortality by
producing a child undermines the protective intimacy of his household and
makes him an active accessory to his own cuckoldry.59 His incontrollable
urge, an integral part of his overall vulgarity and vacuity, enables strangers to
win his trust and defeat him. But their victory, which would have been glori-
ous if achieved in a political or military battle, is no triumph at all. For the
intelligence of the winners is hardly better than the inanity of the loser.60 It is a
sterile intelligence, and no amount of mandrake potion can render it fertile. It
serves nothing beyond the satisfaction of immediate desires and fancies.
There is thus little but superficialities to tell between victim and conman. The
human world which between them they epitomize is nasty and empty, yet no
avenue to redemption of any kind is suggested, no hope for a better place held
out. The comedy is all but a tragedy in disguise.61

***
Taken together, the literary works discussed above impart a conception of the
world of men as simultaneously a vale of tears and the only one they have. It is
no way station. The journey of human life begins and ends within the same
physical and spiritual confines. Machiavelli thus encloses man in this world,
and cuts all the threads with which man seeks to connect to eternity. Belfagor
overturns Christian doctrine by presenting Hell as a polity better ordered than
Earth, let alone the fact that the devil-man comes not to save humanity but to
observe it,62 only to be forced to return shamefaced to his infernal dwelling.
The Ass, too, subverts theological tenets regarding the hereafter, and takes a
sideswipe at humanistic amour propre by showing the animal kingdom as a
much happier place than the human world. Also, on the God-forsaken stage of
Mandragola he obliquely disparages the family and satirizes the will to
vicarious immortality by procreation. Machiavelli blocks the routes of escape
from death in a sordid here-and-now. It is only in this world and by their own
limited abilities that men can find something with which to elevate and
redeem themselves from a ‘mandragolesque’ existence. For Machiavelli that
59 He does of course consent to being cuckolded for the sake of having a child, but on
the assumption that he and the cuckolding man do not and will not know each other. On
the dynamics of hypocrisy in the play see Ruth Weissbourd Grant, Hypocrisy and Integ-
rity: Machiavelli, Rousseau and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago, 1997), pp. 44–53.
60 Cf. Sasso, ‘Considerazioni sulla “Mandragola” ’, p. 61; Giorgio Inglese, ‘Mandragola’,
in Letteratura italiana: Le Opere, Vol. 1, Dalle Origini al Cinquecento, ed. Alberto Asor
Rosa (Turin, 1992), pp. 1009–31, at p. 1019.
61 Sasso, ‘Considerazioni sulla “Mandragola” ’, p. 122; Inglese, ‘Mandragola’, p. 1015.
62 Sumberg, ‘Belfagor’, p. 247.

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462 H. ZMORA

something is politics.63 Politics alone can save men, from themselves as well
as from other men.64 Unlike the world of the Mandragola, politics is a realm
of seriousness and grandeur. As he put it in the Dedicatory Letter to The
Prince, the ‘gravity of the subject’ is such that it needs no stylistic ornamenta-
tion to recommend it.65 Yet for all their potential nobility, men’s political cre-
ations fare no better than individual human beings. They, too, ‘have a term to
their lives’.66 Even the grandest and most successful states and empires are
transient. The institutions that men set up, the dikes and dams they erect
against the violent river of Fortuna,67 the entire panoply of political remedies,
arrangements, measures and expedients that make up Machiavelli’s teach-
ing — all these are subject to the destructive power of time.68 This cannot be
otherwise. History unfolds according to a harsh and inexorable logic, where-
by the very success of a political unit is the cause of its eventual decline:
ascendancy brings tranquillity, tranquillity saps the martial spirit that had
generated greatness, and the enervated people falls prey to up-coming warlike
powers.69 This was the dynamic that raised Rome and then brought her
down.70 It is when states are at the pinnacle of their strength and seem most
secure that they begin to gather pace in their march towards the end. Thus, by
its very insistence and comprehensiveness, Machiavelli’s operation of sever-
ing the links to everlastingness suggests that he saw them as a central element
in a perennial human quest to overcome death and give meaning to life. But if
this is true, then it must also be the case that Machiavelli threatens man with a
sweeping meaninglessness, with a virtually complete absurdity of existence.
Machiavelli’s may look like a counsel of despair to abandon all hope in
human endeavour and achievement. But that was actually not Machiavelli’s
view. A case in point is his discussion of Fortuna’s part in human affairs in

63 For Machiavelli this was of course also personally the case. See Machiavelli to
Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513: ‘And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I
forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.’
Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, ed. and trans. James B.
Atkinson and David Sices (De Kalb, IL, 1996), p. 264.
64 Cf. Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, I, pp. 448, 460–1; de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell,
p. 270. Noteworthy in this regard is the absence of ‘anima’ from the Discourses and The
Prince, and its replacement by ‘animo’. See Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, pp. 40, 44,
276–9.
65 The Prince (p. 4).
66 Discourses, III.1 (p. 259).
67 The Prince, 25 (pp. 98–9).
68 Cf. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-
Century Florence (Princeton, 1965), p. 192; Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans, pp. 264, 281;
Fischer, Well-Ordered License, p. 186.
69 Florentine Histories, V.1.
70 Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, I, pp. 534–44; Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans,
pp. 262–3, 266–7.

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 A WORLD WITHOUT A SAVING GRACE 463

the penultimate chapter of The Prince. Machiavelli is here intriguingly

ambivalent, at once fatalistic and forceful, resigned and resolute. Political
action can succeed if and when it accords with ‘the qualities of the times’, he
affirms. A change in these qualities, and ruin ensues. But, as Machiavelli sug-
gested also in The Ass,71 men are largely powerless in the face of such adver-
sity, for they are by nature ill equipped to adjust to changes of circumstance
(of which they themselves are partly the source).72 Yet Machiavelli recom-
mends not quietism, but vigorous, even aggressive conduct. The only remedy
against the realistic pessimism of theory is the incautious optimism of bold
action.73 To retreat in front of harsh reality would amount to a self-fulfilling
prophecy. ‘[Men] must never give up: since they do not know [Fortune’s] pur-
pose . . . they always should have hope and, while hoping, not give up in the
face of any Fortune and any travail they find themselves in.’74
Analogously, the fact that even the great human triumphs are doomed to
vanish into oblivion should not in itself deter men from wishing to make their
mark. That such a thing as eternal memory does not exist still does not mean
that greatness counts for nothing. On the contrary, greatness matters more
than anything else. There is no better example for that than Machiavelli’s
object lesson: Rome. Rome reached the acme of human greatness. There is a
world of difference between it and any other notable historical example. This
is made particularly clear in Machiavelli’s discussion of the relative merits of
internally tumultuous, externally expansionist republics such as Rome on the
one hand, and of serene, static republics such as Sparta or Venice on the other.
By his own critical criterion of longevity,75 Sparta and Venice must rate
higher than Rome, as he himself admits.76 This consideration notwithstand-

71 See n. 44, above.

72 Cf. n. 45, above; The Prince, 25 (pp. 99–100); Discourses, III.9 (p. 297);
Machiavelli to Giovan Battista Soderini, 13–21 September 1506 (Opere, II, pp. 137–8).
73 The Prince, 25 (p. 101).
74 Discourses, II.29 (p. 245). See also Machiavelli to F. Vettori, 25 February 1514: ‘I
believe now, I have always believed, and I shall continue to believe that what Boccaccio
says is true: it is better to act and to regret it than not to act and to regret it.’ Machiavelli
and his Friends, p. 282; Florentine Histories, III.13.
75 Discourses, I.11 (p. 58): ‘A republic’s or a kingdom’s salvation, therefore, lies not
in having a prince who governs wisely while he is living, but one who organizes it in such
a way that when he dies it may still be maintained.’ See Varotti, Gloria e ambizione
politica, pp. 421–3.
76 Discourses, I.5 (p. 36): ‘. . . freedom lasted longer in Sparta and Venice than it did
in Rome’; I.6 (p. 41): ‘I would indeed believe that, to set up a republic which endures over
a long time, the way to organize it internally should be Sparta’s or Venice’s’. See also
The Art of War, I (Chief Works, II, p. 585): ‘Rome was free four hundred years and was
armed; Sparta, eight hundred.’

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464 H. ZMORA

ing, Machiavelli comes down on the side of Rome.77 The arguments he makes
for his choice do not quite stand up to rational scrutiny. But his partiality for
Rome is actually dictated by reasoning of a different order: it is Rome’s
greater glory that decides the issue.78 As indeed he asserts, ‘Rome had as its
aim empire and glory, and not tranquillity’.79 Remarkably for an arch-realist,
glory trumps prudent standards of political evaluation. The fact that, sooner or
later, the memory of Rome, like that of any other civilization, is bound to per-
ish, makes no difference.80
Against the foil of indifference that Machiavelli normally exhibits towards
the various ends of human endeavour,81 glory shines as an end in itself. It
bears the stamp of an ultimate value. The evanescence of greatness is on this
account not an insurmountable obstacle to pursuing it. It is the most that
humans can achieve, and is infinitely preferable to the alternative of evanes-
cent pettiness. Believing and acting otherwise can only aggravate the human
predicament. Hence it is precisely the grim vision of man and his world that
undergirds Machiavelli’s expectation that the desire for glory would never-
theless prevail over other appetites and would subserve the construction of a
robust political order. That is, precisely the unavailability of any transcendent
outlet from this world should send men seeking the only path that Machiavelli
does leave open for them to attain to some form of immortality: the narrow
and dangerous path of glory.
Significantly, this road is not equally accessible to all.82 It is not for the
common run of people, whose minds are shaped and hopes sustained by reli-
gious belief. Now Machiavelli held religious faith to be essential to the
wellbeing of the body politic. But he made in this respect a sharp distinction
between the leaders of the body politic on the one hand, and those who are led
by them on the other:
The princes of a republic or a kingdom must therefore maintain the founda-
tions of the religion that they practice; and if they do so it will be easy for
them to preserve religious belief and consequently goodness and unity in
their republic. And they must foster and strengthen all things that happen in
its favour, even if they judge them to be false. The wiser they are and the

77 For a change in Machiavelli’s attitude in the final years of his life, and his revalua-
tion of Venice, see Bausi, Machiavelli, pp. 309–12.
78 See the illuminating discussion in Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans, pp. 261–2.
79 Discourses, II.9 (p. 184 [with slight emendation]).
80 It is to be noted, however, that people like Machiavelli, who study political great-
ness, help to keep memories of historical paragons vivid. An example is his discussion of
the Etruscans in Discourses, II.4 (p. 174). See also II.5.
81 Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans, p. 250. See also Charles S. Singleton, ‘The Perspec-
tive of Art’, The Kenyon Review, 15 (2) (1953), pp. 169–89, at pp. 181–2.
82 Cf. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 282.

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more knowledgeable about nature (conoscitori delle cose naturali), the

more they must do so.83
Religion is highly useful if it is kept in its proper place, under the knowing
tutelage of the political élite. But if it is sincerely held by all, if it controls
rather than being controlled, if it strikes terror in the hearts of all, then its
power cannot but have harmful influence.84 Therefore members of the ruling
class must not believe, but definitely act as if they did.85 The better they under-
stand the principle and role of religion, the more effective will be their use of
it. Religion in Machiavelli’s analysis is not denied a spiritually edifying part
in the life of the common people, but it is also a particularly vital tool of gov-
erning them: a political instrument consciously utilized by the political class
to impose order — and themselves — on their social inferiors, presupposing
clever dissimulation as a necessary condition for its successful application.86
‘In all human affairs it may be noted, upon close examination, that one
drawback can never be eliminated without another one arising.’87 The reli-
gious belief that is so crucial in making the common people good citizens can-
not have this desired effect on the great.88 On the contrary, society is at risk of
being led by rational nihilists dedicated to nothing beyond their own advan-
tage. The consequences of this for society will be at least as dire as under a
leadership of earnest believers. It is here that the desire for glory comes in. It is
no accident that those to whom Machiavelli attributes glory are all statesmen
or generals, eminent men in the realms of high politics and war.89 There is thus
a correlation between those who know too much as to hold themselves the
beliefs they want others to hold and those to which Machiavelli opens the way
of glory. The disenchanted understanding they possess of the ways of the
83 Discourses, I.12 (p. 60).
84 John M. Najemy, ‘Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of
Interpreting Religion’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (4) (1999), pp. 659–81, at
p. 677; Pierre Manent, Naissances de la politique moderne: Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau
(Paris, 1977), p. 34.
85 Similar advice is given to the ruler in The Prince, 18.
86 For penetrating treatments of the subject see Cutinelli-Rèndina, Chiesa e religione
in Machiavelli, esp. pp. 84–5, 161–214; Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina, Introduzione a
Machiavelli (Rome–Bari, 1999), pp. 74–89; Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, I, pp. 553–7. See
also Benedetto Fontana, ‘Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Reli-
gion in Machiavelli’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (4) (1999), pp. 639–58; Najemy,
‘Papirius and the Chickens’; Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans, p. 66.
87 Discourses, I.6 (p. 41).
88 Cf. Discourses, I.11 (‘. . . agli uomini rozzi più facilmente si persuada uno ordine o
una opinione nuova’) and The Prince, 9 (‘essendo in quelli [scil. “grandi”] più vedere e
più astuzia’).
89 Price, ‘The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli’, pp. 592, 621. See also Florentine His-
tories, Pr. (p. 8): ‘. . . actions that have greatness in themselves, as do those of govern-
ments and states, however they are treated or whatever end they may have, always appear
to bring men more honour than blame’.

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466 H. ZMORA

world and of nature is the very thing that may well predispose them to the
opinion that the nearest thing to immortality is the glory that lives on long
after one’s death.90
No text is more revealing of the thrust of Machiavelli’s appeal to glory and
his trust in its efficacy than the Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem
iunioris Lauerntii Medices. Nowhere is his idea of glory as a personal, secular
state of grace available to great men and, concurrently, as a political good
more in evidence. A programmatic political tract written between November
1520 and January 1521, it aims at nothing less than swaying the Medici Pope
Leo X into undertaking an overall reform of Florentine political institutions.
Coming to the end of the treatise, Machiavelli pronounces that
. . . no man is so much exalted by any act of his as are those men who have
with laws and with institutions remodelled republics and kingdoms; these
are, after those who have been gods, the first to be praised . . . And so much
has this glory been esteemed by men seeking for nothing other than glory
that when unable to form a republic in reality, they have done it in writing,
as Aristotle, Plato, and many others . . . No greater gift, then, does Heaven
give to a man, nor can Heaven show him a more glorious road than this. So
of all the many blessings God has given to your house and to Your Holiness
in person, this is the greatest: that of giving you power and material for
making yourself immortal, and for surpassing by far in this way your
father’s and your grandfather’s glory.91
It certainly takes a strong conviction to inform a pope that not his holiness
will secure him immortality but rather a down-to-earth political enterprise for
the benefit of his fatherland. But the boldness of the message of glory is
entirely in keeping with Machiavelli’s radical anti-Christian stance.92 The
jocular treatment of Hell in Belfagor, of sin in The Ass, or of religious morals
in the Mandragola and elsewhere,93 has a serious political — and polemi-
cal — side, which is most apparent in the Discourses. The examination of the
function of religion in general, which was carried out in the early part of the
first book,94 culminates in a particular censure of Christianity in the early
part of the second book. The great store which ancient pagan religion set by
glory is the touchstone against which Christianity is evaluated and judged
disastrously wanting. The responsibility for the political and military
90 Cf. Martin Fleisher, ‘The Ways of Machiavelli and the Ways of Politics’, History of
Political Thought, XVI (1995), pp. 330–55, at p. 354.
91 A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence (Chief Works, I, p. 114).
92 Cutinelli-Rèndina, Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli, p. 202, has pointed out that
Machiavelli’s condemnation of Christianty as such was unprecedented. See also Gennaro
Sasso, ‘De aeternitate mundi (Discorsi II 5)’, in Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, Vol. 1
(Milan, 1987), pp. 167–399, at p. 175.
93 De’ romiti (Opere, III, p. 29): ‘e poi, chi vede il diavol daddovero, lo vede con men
corna e manco nero’.
94 Discourses, I.11–15.

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weakness of the Moderns is laid squarely on the Christian ideas of Heaven and
Hell:
. . . ancient religion exalted (beatificava) only men full of worldly glory,
such as commanders of armies and rulers of republics. Our religion has glo-
rified (ha glorificato) humble and contemplative men more than active
ones. It has then placed the highest good in humility, abjection, and con-
tempt for things human . . . And if our religion requires you to have strength
within yourself, it wants you to be ready to suffer rather than do something
strong. This way of life, therefore, seems to have made the world weak and
handed it over as prey to wicked men who can control it securely since the
general run of men, in order to go to Heaven, think more of enduring their
blows than of avenging them.95
The final blow is delivered in Chapter 5 of the second book, in which Chris-
tianity is considered to be a ‘sect’ just like any other that had preceded it and
that will succeed it: violently political, bent on wiping out the memory of the
faith it had superseded, and bound to suffer the same fate in turn. For while the
world is eternal, religions come and go at a rate of two or three times every
5000 or 6000 years. This is all part of a natural cycle whereby complex politi-
cal and cultural bodies, like simple bodies, undergo periodic purges.96 Chris-
tianity, like anything else in the world, is finite. Naturally, it cannot genuinely
offer immortality to its adherents.
Machiavelli’s naturalistic irreligiosity is thus the bedrock of his notion of
glory. It is no accident that it comes into full view in the concentrated polemic
against Christianity. For the very rejection of the hope in an afterlife, in the
name of a naturalistic conception of the world, renders the meaning of human
existence disconcertingly problematic — as indeed the literary works dis-
cussed above make plain: if man has to struggle against Fortuna but cannot
rely on Providence; if the human beings with whom he shares this fate are so
wicked that they would each be foolish to put their trust in anything but fraud
and force in their dealings with each other; if even so they can never fully ful-
fil the inborn desires by which they are guided, and are therefore bound to be
frustrated and discontented; if there is no religious or other ethical vision that
can elevate and ennoble mankind; if death liberates man from all this wretch-
edness but at the cost of inflicting complete and indefeasible nothingness; and
if even monumental human achievements are impermanent — then a grave
and tormenting question must arise as to the point of it all. An answer must be
95 Discourses, II.2 (p. 167). Cutinelli-Rèndina, Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli,
p. 226, has noted the provocative terminological inversion effected by Machiavelli in
writing that pagan religion ‘beatified’ military and republican leaders, whilst Christian-
ity ‘glorified’ humble and contemplative men. See also The Art of War, II (Opere, I, pp.
585–6).
96 Discourses, II.5. A comprehensive interpretation of this chapter is in Sasso, ‘De
aeternitate mundi’. See also Cutinelli-Rèndina, Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli, pp.
238–45; Coby, Machiavelli’s Romans, p. 264.

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468 H. ZMORA

sought not only to explain human initiative and resilience, but also to help
keep men from despairing and sinking still further into the abyss. A motive
must be identified and conceptually developed to stimulate them into action,
and action for the common good at that. Religion is no adequate resource for
this, as far as the sophisticates of the world are concerned. They will only be
moved by a force capable of gratifying their selfish desires, but one that has a
spiritual dimension capable as it were of dignifying them, lifting them to the
region of ‘immortality’. Men such as Caesar, Pompey, Scipio, Marcellus and
‘so many Roman generals’ who performed great deeds, are indeed praised for
their fame ‘as though they were gods’;97 and when the bestowal of glory on
such men is well institutionalized, their bid for it not only does no harm to the
common good but results in an overall greatness that echos in eternity. It is the
hallmark of a well-ordered political community that glory is used in this way
to square the ambitions of individuals with the interests of society.98
In offering this solution to the fundamental political problem, Machiavelli
may well have had his own personal doubts and anxieties to guide him. After
all, he resembles closely those Roman leaders and ‘conoscitori delle cose
naturali’ who according to him knew that the effective truth of religion did
not reside in doctrine. In his Machiavellian world, only glory, or its bastard
‘fame’, could give life a sense. In this respect, at least, Machiavelli was truly a
prophet of modernity.

Hillay Zmora99 BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

97 The Art of War, I (Chief Works, I, p. 575).

98 Discourses, III.28 (p. 340): ‘A well-organized republic must therefore . . . open the
ways to those who seek favours by public routes and close them to those who seek them
by private routes. As we can see, that is what Rome did. For to reward those who did good
to the public, it instituted triumphs and all the other honours that it gave its citizens.’ Cf.
Florentine Histories, VII.1.
99 I would like to thank Sheilagh Ogilvie, Paul Rahe and Hanan Yoran for their com-
ments on earlier versions of this article.

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