the frauds of humanism: cicero, machiavelli, and the rhetoric of imposture

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The Frauds of Humanism: Cicero, Machiavelli, and the Rhetoric of Imposture Author(s): Michelle Zerba Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 215-

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Michelle Zerba

215

Rhetorica, Vol. XXII, Issue 3, pp. 215–240, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 1533-8541. ©2004 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rightsreserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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

Abstract: Machiavelli’s advocacy of force and fraud in the conduct

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

“Machiavellian” and that has led to the conception of The Prince

as the first document in the Western tradition to lay bare the dark,

demonic underside of civic humanism. But this interpretation over-

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

sonal rivalry inhabits the humanist vision from antiquity, produc-

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

to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise of integrity

and service. This vision is nowhere more apparent than in Cicero’s

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

manists of the quattrocentro in whose direct descent Machiavelli

stands. Deception, to put it simply, is an acknowledged and vital

element in civic humanism long before The Prince. The difference

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

euphemistically inflected while Machiavelli opts for a hard-edged

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

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

affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and

the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.

A prince must know how to make good use of both the beast and theman. Ancient writers made subtle note of this fact when they wrotethat Achilles and many other princes of antiquity were sent to be rearedby Chiron the centaur, who trained them in this discipline. Having ateacher who is half man and half beast can only mean that a prince mustknow how to use both of these two natures, and that one without theother has no lasting effect.

Machiavelli, The Prince (Chapter 18)



R H E T O R I C A216

This passage, which occurs in the most maligned and crit-ically disputed chapter of The Prince, embodies one ofMachiavelli’s hard teachings. We are half-beast, he says,

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

“Thus a prudent prince cannot and should not keep his word whento do so would go against him or when the reasons that made himpledge it no longer apply.” He must appear to, however; he mustput up a good show of being honest while conducting himself de-ceitfully. This is one example among others of Machiavelli’s rejectingthe idealism of political utopias for la verita effettuale della cosa, “theeffective truth of the matter” (Chapter 15): to rule well, a prince mustlearn how not to be good. What motivates this endorsement of fraud?“[Human beings] are a sad lot, and keep no faith with you; you inyour turn are under no obligation to keep it with them.”

Here are the outlines of the “murderous Machiavel” who stalkedthe Renaissance stage, a diabolic manipulator prepared to cheat, lie,and kill to secure his ends. Iago is his most familiar name.2 Popularas the stereotype has remained over the centuries, it has generated,by way of reaction, a nearly contrary image of the Florentine as thepassionate defender of free states and civic liberty.3 Wing-clipped and

1I have used the Latin text of De Oratore by K.F. Kumaniecki (M. Tulli Ciceroniscripta quae manserunt omnia, Fasc. 3, “ De Oratore” [Stuttgart, 1995]). For De Officiis,I have used the text by C. Atzert in the same Teubner series, Fasc. 48, 1914. Alltranslations from Latin are my own. For Machiavelli, I have used Opere, ed. EzioRaimondi. 5th ed. Milan. 1971. Translations of The Prince are by Robert Adams, rev. ed.(New York, 1992) and of the Discourses by Christian E. Detmold (New York, 1950),with occasional changes of my own.

See Discourses 2.13 for a fuller statement of this view in the context of the Romanstate. Machiavelli is not always consistent in his assertion of the priority of fraud.In The Prince, Chapter 14, he claims that the art of war is “the only art which is ofconcern to one who commands.” But the rhetorical dimension of this assertion—theimportance of a prince controlling praise or blame in the pursuit of war—is integral tothe chapter; see Discourses 1.10.

2J.A. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1964), 157–58, treats this view as one of the dominant myths of Machi-avelli. For other discussions of the Elizabethan Machiavelli, see M. Praz, “Machiavelliand the Elizabethans,” Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1928): 49–97 and F. Raab,The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).

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



The Frauds of Humanism 217

sanitized, this Machiavelli of republican ideals is a bird that has beentrained to navigate low flight patterns over terrain everyone findsfamiliar and unthreatening. He is one of the classical republicans,a bit scruffier than the rest, but respectable all the same, and whenhe advocates force or fraud, he does so with anguish. For the betterpart of the last century, this tamed Machiavelli has been the oneto hold the stage. It is no wonder, then, that the current swing ofthe pendulum has critics reviving the bad-boy of the Elizabethans.4

Integral to this revival has been the image of the red-robed Florentinechancellor as an agent provocateur who tended foreign affairs by dayand by night devised subversive techniques for turning humanismagainst itself.5

If recent discussion has revived debate about Machiavelli’s hu-manism, it has also brought back interest in a related question. Doesthe teaching about fraud set out in Chapter 18 of The Prince constitutethe scandalous break from the classical tradition that critics have typ-ically claimed it has? In articulating it, is Machiavelli departing fromthe precepts of others, or does the example of Chiron the centaurconfirm an ancient commitment to educating leaders-to-be on boththe rational and bestial sides of their nature?6 An adequate responsemust be framed in terms of important classical texts that have beenconsistently overlooked in the discussion. This includes works bythe Roman author from whom Machiavelli in all likelihood drew thesimile of the lion and the fox: Cicero.7

Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945). For a discussion of the problemsposed by the history of republican readings of Machiavelli, see V. Kahn, MachiavellianRhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1994), 16–43. She also shows how versions of the two opposed readings to which Irefer circulated from the time The Prince was first published in 1532.

4A clarion call to “radicalizing” the republican Machiavelli came from M. Hal-liung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

5See the theses of L. P. S. de Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise: A Commentaryon the Prince (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999); Kahn, MachiavellianRhetoric, cited in n. 3 above; and M. McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe, in HumanaCivilitas: Studies and Sources Relating to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 8 (Malibu:Undena Publications, 1983).

6There is no known analogue in classical literature for Machiavelli’s allegori-cal interpretation of Chiron. Recent discussions have focused on how Machiavelli’sdoctrine of fraud is a public revelation, a speaking out loud, of a teaching that wasdeliberately hidden in antiquity. See Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, pp. 75–100;H. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37–38;and Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 4–43.

7De Officiis 1.13.41 may be the locus classicus for the simile in The Prince, thoughMachiavelli, in keeping with a tendency of Renaissance critics not to cite their sources,




It is Cicero, of course, who largely shaped the humanist traditioninherited by the cinquecento.8 Two interrelated concepts central tothis tradition are relevant to the problem we are examining. Onepresents human beings as having progressed beyond the conditionof beasts when they congregated in communities guided by theexercise of reason and the rule of justice.9 The other idealizes theprimal founders of these communities as morally good men skilledin speaking who exemplify the cooperative, peacekeeping virtuesof wisdom, justice, temperance, and liberality.10 Set forth in Book 1of Cicero’s De Officiis, these four so-called cardinal virtues remainedcentral to the assimilation of pagan moral ideas in the Latin West from

does not mention Cicero. None of Machiavelli’s letters, so far as I know, casts light onthe question, though Machiavelli’s father had a copy De Officiis in his private library.

8On Machiavelli’s humanist education, in particular, see Mansfield, Machiavelli’sVirtue, cited in n. 6 above, pp. 31–36; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 15–17; S. deGrazia, Sebastian, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989),3–28; Q. Skinner, Machiavelli (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4–5; J.H. Geercken,“Machiavelli Studies Since 1969,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 352–54; F.Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 318–22; and Mazzeo, Renaissance andSeventeenth-Century Studies, cited in n. 2 above, pp. 124–32. D. Marsh, The Quattrocen-tro Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980), shows how influential Cicero’s De Oratore was on Florentinehumanists from Leonardo Bruni to Giovanni Pontano. A complete text of the dialogue,which circulated in fragmentary versions during the Middle Ages, was discovered inLodi in 1421.

9See, for example, Isocrates, Antidosis 2.74; Aristotle, Politics 1.2; Dante, Inferno11.24; and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2.1.31.7; 90.1. The “progressivist” viewof human enlightenment coexists in the Middle Ages with the pessimistic Augustinianview. Though Machiavelli may be linked with Augustine in his conception of man asborn bad and capable of only limited good, his passionate insistence on building apolitical philosophy that embraces the bestial side could not be more un-Augustinian.See Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, pp. 1–28 and 145–48.

10On this tradition see G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secu-lar Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1999), 196–240; M. L. Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey, rev.ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 50–61; Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, cited in n. 8above, pp. 88–104; F. Gilbert, “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Princeof Machiavelli,” The Journal of Modern History 11 (1939): 449–83; and A. H. Gilbert,Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners (Durham: Duke University Press, 1938), 3–18.See N. Wood, “The Value of Asocial Sociability: Contributions of Machiavelli, Sidney,and Montesquieu,” in M. Fleisher ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought(New York: Atheneum, 1972), 282–307, for a succinct summary of the normative clas-sical view of civic harmony against which Machiavelli was reacting. For a fulleranalysis of Cicero’s social and political thought and, in particular, of his ideal gentle-man/statesman, see N. Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1988), 70–89, 100–104, 178.




Lactantius to Dante and formed the core of the mirror-for-magistratesliterature with its paradigm of the archetypal prince.11 Those whoargue that Machiavelli rebelled against this interpretation of rulinghave compelling reasons to do so; he frequently invoked it in orderto reject its premises and conclusions.12

But the case for Machiavelli’s anti-humanism has too often over-valued the idealist strain of the tradition with its emphasis on har-mony and consensus in human communities. In the process, an im-portant fact has been overlooked: a politics of intense competitionand personal rivalry has inhabited the humanist vision from antiq-uity, producing an ethics of expediency and a pantomimic morality,which seeks to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise ofintegrity and service.13 Critics have already observed the role of DeOfficiis, with its adjustments of the standard of truth to the standardof utility, in shaping the Renaissance concept of an agonistic and

11See A. R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero’s De Officiis (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1996), 88–101; J. T. Muckle, “The Influence of Cicero in the Formationof Christian Culture,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 42 (1948): 107–25;and N.E. Nelson, “Cicero’s De Officiis in Christian Thought: 300–1300,” in Essays andStudies in English and Comparative Literature, 10 (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1933), 59–160.

12A. H. Gilbert in Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners and F. Gilbert in “TheHumanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli,” both cited in n. 10above, set forth the history of Machiavelli’s precursors. But A. H. Gilbert whitewashesThe Prince as a typical book de Regimine Principum, while F. Gilbert presents The Princeas a decisive break from the Christian and humanist tradition. L. Strauss, Thoughts ofMachiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958), reasserts a basically Elizabethan viewof Machiavelli as anti-Christian; more recently, see R. A. Kocis, Machiavelli Redeemed:Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory (Cranbury, New Jer-sey: Associated University Presses, 1998), 93–103. Hulliung in Citizen Machiavelli, citedin n. 4 above, pp. 3–30, discusses these views. For recent discussions of Machiavelli’ssubversion of classical models of prudence, see Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, cited inn. 6 above; V. Kahn, “Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology,”Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 105 (1990): 464–76; Kahn, MachiavellianRhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, passim; E. Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and McCanles, The Discourse of IlPrincipe.

13A few critics have discussed this agonistic conception including M. Colish,“Cicero’s De Officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978):81–93; I. Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in I. Berlin, Against the Current: Essaysin the History of Ideas (New York: Penguin, 1980), 25–79; J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (NewYork: Russell and Russell, 1965), 92–105; and F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrineof Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, tr. W. Stark (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1957), 25–44. The most sustained reading to date is by Halliung, CitizenMachiavelli.




morally neutral statesmanship of grand actions.14 This view, how-ever, remains marginal in critical studies of humanism. Moreover, ithas not been related, as it needs to be, to a work that significantlyinfluenced cinquecento thought—Cicero’s De Oratore. It is in this dia-logue that we find the most fully developed view of the civic leaderas one pitched in a heroic battle for preeminence that must rely onthe rhetoric of imposture.15 If the strain of civic humanism exem-plified by De Oratore has yet to be fully appreciated in discussionsof Machiavelli, this is at least in part because it is still neglected indiscussions of Cicero himself.16 The agonistic context, then, of Romanrhetoric needs to be more fully explored for it provides the commonground from which the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud andthe Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation spring.

A clarification is needed, however, before we proceed. In someobvious ways, The Prince and De Oratore are very different works.Cicero speaks to individuals who are politicians in the Roman state,and he assumes that their chief role is persuasion rather than theuse of military force. This distinction, of course, is fundamental tothe classical tradition extending at least as far back as the sophists(Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen famously thematizes the contrast) andeven beyond them to Homer: bia and peitho are often presented, asin the embassy scene of the Iliad or in Odysseus’ cunning rhetoric

14See especially Colish, “Cicero’s De Officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince.” Kahn,Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, p. 32, in her discussion of the utile andthe honestum does not cite Colish, though she mentions in a note on p. 257 Colish’sargument about Cicero as a proto-Machiavellian. J. F. Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: TheRhetorical Approaches in More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s The Prince,” The SixteenthCentury Journal 19 (1988): 187–207, relies upon the Ciceronian project of bringinghonestas into alignment with utilitas and sees Machiavelli as deliberately setting theterms at odds.

15See M. Zerba, “Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Cicero’s De Oratore,”Classical Philology 97 (2002): 299–321. Halliung’s discussion of Cicero in Citizen Machi-avelli, cited in n. 4 above, does not treat De Oratore.

16Twenty years later, the view of Hulliung in Citizen Machiavelli, like that ofColish in “Cicero’s De Officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” has still not been fullyassimilated. Wood in Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, cited in n. 10 above, pp.176–93, acknowledging an alternative and largely ignored Cicero who is “a hard-headed realist, well versed in the pitfalls of power, the complexities of manipulation,and the uses of violence,” notes a connection to Machiavelli without developing it.When Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, pp. 8–59, re-establishes thevalue of the Renaissance Machiavel against theorists of secular republicanism whodivorce rhetoric from politics, she glances at the alternative humanist tradition, butshe says little of Cicero. Zerba in “Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Cicero’s DeOratore,” fully develops the case for this alternative Cicero.




in the Odyssey, as alternative and even opposing methods by whichan agent may move others. But we need to approach the distinctionin a qualified way. Not only is the agonistic motive strong, as alreadynoted, in both the Greek and Roman contexts of rhetoric (deliberativeand forensic oratory are always overtly implicated in a “war ofwords,” epideictic usually tacitly so). In Cicero’s world, many Romanpoliticians—arguably, the most prominent in the late Republic—wereboth speakers and leaders of armies. Generals not infrequently heldthe role of consul, and proconsuls in the provinces typically hadcontrol of military force. Techniques of persuasion were pervasivelyintertwined with state-sanctioned violence, or in the case of the civilwars of the first century BCE, with illegally seized violence, in waysthat are perhaps best epitomized by Cicero’s own rhetorical attempts,conflicted as they were, to present the blood-steeped, autocraticstruggles of Julius Caesar as those of a man who had the restorationof the Republic at heart.17

Machiavelli, on the other hand, addresses a prince who, aboveall else, controls an army. The emphasis is signaled in the first chapterof The Prince where the guiding interest of the text in those who seizenew states is qualified by the phrase, “they may be acquired eitherby force of other people’s arms or with one’s own.” But if the sinequa non of Machiavellian power is military might, then rhetoric is theskill that allows the prince to manipulate this might with politicaleffectiveness. Another way to put it is that an army is both therealistic agent of material conquest and a signifying entity whosemeaning goes well beyond the material one of conquering foes orsuppressing revolt. It is this capacity of an army to generate meaningthat necessitates rhetorical manipulation.18 The best prince is onewho can skillfully manage, through techniques of persuasion, theall-important matter of public perception, especially as it relates toforce. We will elaborate these observations as we proceed in thediscussion. But at the outset, the reader may wish to conceptualize thetexts of Cicero and Machiavelli as chiastically related to each other,with rhetoric and military force assuming inverted but dialecticalrelationships.

17For recent discussions of Cicero’s vacillating and deeply compromised rhetor-ical stances toward Julius Caesar, see T. N. Mitchell, Cicero: The Senior Statesman (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1991), 232–325, and A. Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Timesof Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York: Random House, 2001), 203–50.

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




The teaching about the fox in Chapter 18 of The Prince willallow us to cut directly to the importance of rhetoric in Machiavelli’spolitics.19 While a prince may not have all the admirable qualitiestraditionally ascribed to a good ruler, Machiavelli says that

it is very necessary he should seem to have them (e bene necessario pareredi averle). Indeed, I will venture to say that when you have them andexercise them all the time, they are harmful to you (sonno dannose); whenyou just seem to have them, they are useful (sonno utili). It is good toappear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere, and religious; it is good tobe so in reality. But you must keep your mind so disposed that, in case ofneed, you can turn to the exact contrary.

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

19On the fox and lion, see Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5 above,pp. 85–90; Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, cited in n. 12 above, pp. 86–91;J.B. Atkinson, tr., Machiavelli: The Prince (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 278–80;Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, cited in n. 2 above, pp. 101–6; andA. H. Gilbert, Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 118–39.W. Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1988), Chapter 1, has a more extended thematic treatment. On Machiavelli’sprimitivism, see A. Bonadeo, Corruption, Conflict, and Power in the Works and Timesof Niccolo Machiavelli, in University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 108(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), and D. Waley, “The Primitivist Elementin Machiavelli’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1971): 91–98.

20Treatments of Machiavellian virtu are too numerous to list here, but among theones I have found most helpful for this study are those by Mansfield, Machiavelli’sVirtue, cited in n. 6 above, pp. 6–52; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 4 above,pp. 8–43; Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, cited in n. 12 above, pp. 26–91;M. Fleisher, “A Passion for Politics: The Vital Core of the World of Machiavelli,” inM. Fleisher ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum,1972), 114–47; and Whitfield, Machiavelli, cited in n. 13 above, pp. 92–105.




one reason why the practice of governing is an eternal contest: theone who rules must wrestle the pragmatically useful out of events.He must fight a force, figured as female, to avoid being overcome,which is figured as potential castration. Under such conditions, moralaction is a luxury that the prince cannot always afford. There is somuch clawing for dear life in the fray of politics that the pressuresof “doing good” become niceties that one takes as the taking comes.The real challenge for the prince is not achieving the idealized virtuerepresented in the speculum-tradition; it is trying to “avoid the publicdisgrace of those vices that would lose him the state . . . But if hecannot avoid them altogether, he should not be too worried aboutindulging them” (Chapter 15). This is the softer version of a hardparadox in Machiavelli: “virtue” includes the ability to do evil.21

In doing evil, however, a prince is obliged to shape what peoplethink. A leader must exploit the large gap between moral ideals andthe practices necessary for the state to survive. Machiavelli says hehas to know how to “whitewash” (colorire) his conduct, to be a greatsimulatore e dissimulatore, “for everyone sees what you appear to be,few know what you really are” (Chapter 18).22 That is why the onewho aspires to rule is advised, above all, to “lay his foundations onwhat is under his own control, not on what is controlled by others”’(Chapter 17). This holds true especially of military affairs. The pointis affirmed in Chapter 10: “princes control their own destiny whenthey command enough money or men to assemble an adequate armyand make a stand against anyone who attacks them.” Machiavelli’sadmiration, however, is reserved for a man who used the materialstrength of his army with rare rhetorical adeptness. Cesare Borgia,understanding the value of having someone else do the dirty work,made Remirro de Orco, “a cruel and vigorous man,” into the strong-armed henchman who rounded up and killed thugs plundering theRomagna (Chapter 7). Then, having set up a civil court in the middleof the land, Borgia allowed people to vent their anger against theman to whom he had given absolute powers by condemning him todeath—after which he had his body cut in two and placed in a publicsquare. “The ferocity of this scene left the people at once stunnedand satisfied (satisfatti e stupidi).” Here was a prince who knew how

21Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, pp. 6–52, has an excellent discussion of theparadox.

22This point is central to the theses of Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric; Garver,Machiavelli and the History of Prudence; and McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe,cited in n. 5. Fleisher, “A Passion for Politics,” cited in n. 20, has a good discussionof the relationship between inganno, fraude, and virtu.




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

The style of such passages as those in which Machiavelli praisesCesare Borgia is worth remarking. He yokes an encomiastic mo-tive with a language of unmitigated violence. Far from trying to“whitewash” a prince whom posterity has seen, by and large, as amonster, Machiavelli paints him in all his bloody grandeur. The im-pressive stature of the personage is conveyed vividly in descriptionsof him, in keeping with the encomiastic motive. But it is linked witha deliberately outrageous representation of no-holds-barred cruelty,which goes against the grain of traditional encomium. Borgia him-self, of course, had to ameliorate his violence (present himself asjust) through dissociation and the use of a scapegoat. In this sense,he bowed to tradition. Not Machiavelli in his representation of Bor-gia. He unmasks his hero’s strategies of amelioration for what theyare—cold-blooded yet effective means of pursuing acquisitive ends.Rhetorically, the ordinary positions of the one praising and the onepraised have been reversed, since the terms in which Borgias is de-scribed make him out to be morally less than what he made himselfout to be. But this “morally less” is then brilliantly upgraded in thetext when Machiavelli recontextualizes his hero according to a stan-dard not of virtue but of virtu.23 What better example could there bethan the mutilated body of Remirro de Orco to convey the point thatit is the prince, not those around him, who defines what is “good”?What better example that “laying one’s own foundation,” is, in theultimate instance, a rhetorical act?

The rhetoric in the text and the rhetoric of the text: the relationshipof these two levels will help us understand both continuities andbreaks between Cicero and Machiavelli. Let us anticipate, however,two key points. First, Machiavelli’s distinction lies not in saying whathas not been said about political power—that it is often brutal andalways acquisitive.24 Rather, taking hold of what Aristotle called oneof the “common topics” (the more and the less), he presents theobject of praise as “less virtuous” and then goes on to elevate it

23Tinkler, “Praise and Advice,” cited in n. 14, speaks of Machiavelli’s replace-ment of the conventionally demonstrative approach to the speculum tradition, whichemploys praise, with a deliberative approach, which sides with expediency againsthonor. I argue that Machiavelli is more extreme than that: he retains praise and couplesit with often brutal expediency.

24See Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 18–20, and Alvarez, The MachiavellianEnterprise, cited in n. 5 above, pp. 75–79.




by redefining virtue.25 This is a classic rhetorical move: refusing tojettison the language of virtue, Machiavelli puts his own spin on it.Cicero, too, will keep the language of virtue in his own encomium ofthe great and powerful in De Oratore. It is what he does with the “lessvirtuous” that distinguishes him from Machiavelli. The differenceis stylistic rather than substantive, though style reveals a good dealabout temperamental divergences between the two men.

There is one last point that needs saying before we move on toCicero. Deception and whitewashing are not, according to Machi-avelli, the practices of princes alone but of leaders of republics, aswell, notably those of the Roman republic. In the Discourses, he re-verts often to an observation that is best summarized in the followingpassage: “the Romans from their early beginnings employed fraud(la fraude), which it has ever been necessary for those to practice whofrom small origins wish to rise to the highest degree of power; andit is the less censurable (vituperabile) the more it is concealed (coperta),as was that practiced by the Romans ” (2.13).26 Numa, successor ofRomulus, is one of the primal founders credited with having intro-duced religion to the state not as a prophet who believed but as astrategist who feigned religious worship (he claimed a nymph di-vulged to him his holy teaching) in order to make human depravityanswerable to the threat of punitive deities (1.11). Though the ex-ample is from Rome’s monarchical period, the claim advanced inthe chapters of the Discourses concerned with religion (1.11–15) isthat a politics of dissimulation was coextensive with the foundingof the state and over time remained central to its greatness. Consulsand consular Comitii alike managed auguries “artfully” in wagingwar and “in every other important civil or military action” (1.14).The advice to rulers about the necessity of being hypocritical hasprobably done more than anything else to darken Machiavelli’s rep-utation. Yet this advice does nothing worse than admonish princesto adopt a tactic that the youthful Cyrus was admonished to adoptin the first book of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, about which Machiavellisays: “Xenophon draws no other conclusion from [Cyrus’s decep-tion] than that a prince who wishes to achieve great things mustlearn to deceive” (2.13).27

25Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.23.426Discourses 1.47, 1.51, and 3.43 are also taken up with the subject of feigning and

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

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




In the preceding passages of The Prince, there is an interest inpenetrating through the “mystery” of hierarchy in order to reveal itspantomimic quality, that is, the ways in which figures of authorityrhetorically manipulate the values of the group through both iden-tification (Borgia’s “justice” and Numa’s “piety”) and an effort attranscendence (Borgia’s “stunning satisfaction” of an audience andNuma’s “prophetic aura” as a man touched by god). There is alsoa thoroughgoing appreciation of the nature of rhetorical truth as con-structed. But this insight, rather than motivating laudatory terms forthe prince as a wise and just leader of people who chooses the bestopinions or upholds a moral order, instead produces a dyslogisticvocabulary of fraud to describe actions that we are then invited toadmire as administratively compelling. Machiavelli, knowing fullwell that the opinions upon which political rhetoric operates do notfall within the true-false test of veracity, nonetheless chooses a delib-erately derogatory term to present princely falseness as an essentialtool of power. The ultimate motivation for this paradoxical down-grading, which also operates as an encomiastic plug, is human na-ture itself, which is driven by acquisitive wants and needs. Moralityis not an escape from this condition but a masking of it. It is preciselythis masking that allows for a mystification of power—a mystifica-tion that Machiavelli reveals as such in his how-to manual. Ciceroperforms a similar act, but its tone and effect are different.

This brings us to De Oratore. The dissimulating practices advo-cated in The Prince and the Discourses, often illustrated with examplesdrawn from the Romans, are very much on display among the Ro-mans whom Cicero makes congregate at Crassus’ Tusculan villa dur-ing the Ludi Romani to discuss the art of persuasion. The implicationsof the setting are important: when the Romans are not engaged in thestruggle of politics or the conflict of war, they are spectators of athleticstruggle, and even in the pastoral countryside, where they appear towithdraw from the political and military arenas, conflict erupts asa “natural” expression of the rivalry between aristocratic males. Thislinkage helps to uncover a pattern basic to the give and take of DeOratore: imitation (fundamental to the classical aesthetic) leads tocompetition, competition leads to invidiousness, and invidiousnessrequires rhetorical upgrading in order to preserve the image of a soci-ety led by noble and honorable men.28 At many points in the dialogue,the interaction of the speakers becomes an exercise in rhetorical sub-

28My discussion is indebted to Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18, pp.49–180




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

We can begin with an example in Book 2 when Antonius, takingthe lead from Crassus, elaborates on the duties of the orator (officiaoratoris). Correlating the traditional ends of rhetoric (probare, concil-iare, movere) with different styles, Antonius focuses on the two hedeems best able to win over an audience.29 One he calls an “ethicalstyle” centered on conciliation (in Orator, this is called the middlestyle, the genus medium) and aimed at showing the audience tokens(signa) of “good nature, generosity, clemency, piety, of a soul gratefuland not covetous or grasping, and all those things typical of men whoare upright, humble, not violent, not obstinate, not contentious, notharsh . . . .” Antonius argues for the utility of showing off such tokens.When we do so, it is “as if the speech is portraying the character of thespeaker” (ut quasi mores oratoris effingat oratio). Those who adopt suchstrategies appear to be (videantur) upright, well-bred, and virtuousmen (2.184).

The language of “appearing to be” permeates De Oratore, thoughthe dialogue generally avoids stating the doctrine of semblance inbold terms. This, of course, is an old theme. Having struggled againstthe dangers of “mere” rhetorical opinion (doxa) in such early di-alogues as Gorgias, Plato laid the groundwork for a philosophicalrhetoric in Phaedrus that would be wed to the rehabilitating and pu-rifying powers of dialectic. It was the possibility of a truth-tellingrhetoric that Aristotle tried to develop in his own work on the sub-ject when he articulated a hierarchy of rhetorical means with logos inthe role of controlling the “errant” powers of ethos and pathos.30 Phi-losophizing much less than his Greek predecessors about the matter,Cicero simply lets the pull of opinion, which is intimately connectedwith ethos and pathos, to carry the course of his argument. That manip-ulation of opinion need not be identified, tout court, with deception

29Cicero correlates the three styles of oratory (grand, middle, plain) with thethree rhetorical ends (moving, pleasing, teaching) in Orator. De Oratore hardly uses thescheme. For a discussion see D. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style inthe English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 14–54; H. Gotoff,Cicero’s Elegant Style: An Analysis of the “Pro Archia” (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1979), 42–65; and H. M. Hubbell, “Cicero on Styles of Oratory,” Yale ClassicalStudies 19 (1966): 171–86.

30For a fuller discussion, see M. Gellrich, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Theory, Truth, andMetarhetoric,” in M. Griffith and D. Mastronarde eds. Cabinet of the Muses: Essayson Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1990), 242–56.




is not a point argued in the text. The reader is left to surmise thepossibilities that inhabit the world of rhetorical seeming, from thebenign display of tokens of good will to the masterful perpetrationof fraud (Borgia-style, for example).

But not quite left to surmise. Guided, channeled, or perhapstrained into double vision would be a better way of putting it, forCicero wants to keep our sight on the connection between seemingand moral uprightness, at the same time that considerable static isbeing thrown up around the connection. He does so by making Anto-nius imitate, in the passage cited above, the very lenitas and urbanitasthat are being promoted in conciliatory speech: the problems of sem-blance recede behind a modest tone and a courteous diction clearlyaimed at fostering benevolenia. In short, the dialogue enacts, here andelsewhere, strategies of ethos by which “seeming to be,” in the verymoment of being described, can avoid association with imposture ordeception. Our guard is dropped, our censure silenced, when appear-ance, as rhetorical technique, is linked with the solicitation of goodwill and thus sequestered from what Cicero, in the shadow of Platoand Aristotle, feels to be the dark side.31 This is precisely the methodMachiavelli admires of the Romans in Discourses 2.13. But as the con-trast with Machiavelli’s treatment shows, Cicero is engaged in thebusiness of rhetorically upgrading semblance, euphemizing it, whennecessary, so that it does not appear morally debased—at least notin the model orator. The strongest language we get in Cicero alongthis axis is dissimulatio, an ameliorated term for what Machiavellitypically prefers to call la fraude.

If the conciliatory style linked with ethos is one way of winningan audience, there is another, more potent way. This resides in thegrand or passionate style, which works not by ingratiating but byforcefully moving. Cicero, himself famous for it, uses the imageryof fire and withering devastation in De Oratore to describe its effects

31The argument is laid out more fully in Zerba, “Love, Envy, and PantomimicMorality in Cicero’s De Oratore,” cited in n. 15. For recent treatments of Cicero con-cerned with matters of pretense, see B. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language ofSocial Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); E. Gunderson, StagingMasculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 2000); J. Hall, “Social Evasion and Aristocratic Manners in Cicero’sDe Oratore,” American Journal of Philology 117 (1996): 95–120; H. Gotoff, “Oratory: theArt of Illusion,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95 (1993): 289–313; and N. Rudd,“Stratagems of Vanity: Cicero, Ad Familiares 5.12, and Pliny’s Letters,” in T. Woodmanand J. Powell eds., Author and Audience in Latin Literature (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), 18–32.




(2.51–53). Vehement oratory with its powerful arousal of emotionoffers, in situations where it can be successfully vented, a shortcut tothe perception of probity. Whether or not a speaker is morally gooddissolves in the onslaught of a display so fiery and captivating thatan audience will believe anything the speaker wants them to. Herewe have a locus classicus of what Longinus, adapting conventionalrhetorical categories, calls the sublime orator, the speaker who blazes,pierces, and assaults his way to transport.32 That the vehement styleis a weapon in the rhetorical armory of the speaker as imposter ismade obvious in De Oratore in several ways.

A vivid instance occurs when Antonius describes the challengehe faced in defending Caius Norbanus, former tribune of the people,against charges of sedition. The prosecutor was Sulpicius, one ofthe young, gifted interlocutors in the dialogue who sits at the feetof his masters. Sulpicius’ youth, Antonius observes, made it all themore embarrassing for him, an older man of censorian rank, to standup in this case and defend the uses of sedition. Antonius claimsthe judgment ought to have been decided against him, not onlybecause his client, Caius Norbanus, was guilty of wrongdoing (headmits this) but because Sulpicius, his opponent, handled himselffrom beginning to end “with a force and indignation and fiery spirit”(vi et dolore et ardore animi) that made his rival fear to draw closeand put it out (2.195–97). Antonius, however, did draw close, and hemet fire with fire. He put on a display of inflammatory rhetoric thatcompletely belied the moral misgivings he felt about the case andthat stirred up support for Norbanus. That was how the prosecutionwas overthrown. In response to this recounting of a past rhetoricalcontest, Sulpicius says with half-dazed wonder: “Never did I seeanything slip from my hands the way that case slipped from mine!”(2.202). Cicero stages this response to confirm how successful thedeceptions of the grand style can be. He also means to showcase,through the dynamics of student-and-master dialogue, a lesson aboutpantomimic morality. When winning is the object, a speaker must beprepared to uphold what he deems to be an immoral cause by arguingas if it were just.33

32I adopt the view of a majority of critics, which is summarized by D. A. Russell,ed., “Longinus” On the Sublime(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) in his introduction, thatthe Longinus who composed On the Sublime was a writer of the first century CE.

33For a recent discussion of “actorliness” in Cicero’s rhetorica, with full scholarlyreferences, see Gunderson, Staging Masculinity, cited in n. 31, pp. 111–48 and 187–221. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance, cited in n. 31,develops a view of social performance and urbanitas in Cicero that has strong the-




As a highly successful advocate, Cicero himself, of course, wasintimately familiar with the provisional nature of rhetorical truth andwas fully prepared to reverse his moral standards, if necessary, to wina case. This was clear in such instances as his forensic defense of aprovincial governor who faced corruption charges of the very sortfor which he had successfully prosecuted Verres. But it was also clearin the deliberative rhetoric on behalf of Julius Caesar in which heshowed a willingness to engage after his return from exile in 57 BCE;the complex web of politics in which he was enmeshed had madehim beholden to the very man whose autocratic ambitions he mostfeared. Caesar was responsible not only for Cicero’s release from exilebut for a loan of 800,000 sesterces that helped Cicero’s family in theirfinancial quandaries. This was the sort of complexity that created thehighly compromised rhetorical postures Cicero assumed in the yearsthat the Republic was collapsing. His sense that moral idealism wasfoolish and potentially deadly in such situations is wittily recordedin a letter he wrote to Atticus in which he observed of the ever high-minded Cato, “I have a warm regard for him as you do. The factremains that with all his patriotism, he can be a political liability. Hespeaks in the Senate as if he were living in Plato’s Republic insteadof Romulus’s cesspool.” 34 This leads to a key point: Cicero’s lettersand the speeches, taken as a corpus, provide a realistic view of moralshiftiness in a rhetorical context that the theory does not so muchreject by adopting idealism as dissimulate by adopting euphemism.We will return to this matter shortly.

As narrated, the Norbanus case is emblematic of larger patternsof Roman conduct depicted in De Oratore and already summed upearlier in the essay. Education is a process of the young (Sulpicius)imitating models, either directly (the elder Antonius) or indirectly(the elder Antonius’ texts); imitation of other males in the context ofpolitics leads to competition; competition and the need to win lead toinvidious matches in which envy between rivals, because it involvesmoral deception, must be masked or upgraded. The desire for honordrives the dynamics. In Machiavelli, it would be rendered in the dys-logistic language of fraud and acquisitiveness; in Cicero, it appearsas a teleologically structured drama of the better man legitimately

atrical elements. Also see E. S. Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).

34See the excellent discussion of Everitt, Cicero, cited in n. 17 above, pp. 129 and146–77, but passim in the latter third of the book. The quotation is taken from Letters toAtticus 12 (XI.I) in Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, ed. and tr. D.R. Shackleton-Bailey. 7 vols.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965–70); quoted in Everitt, p. 129.




seeking advantage. What remains unassimilated is the rhetoricallydowngraded (self-) characterization of Antonius as a censor who de-fended sedition, and that is the touch that lends particularly sharpinsight into the more general rhetorical rehabilitation in which thepassage is invested. This is an excellent example of the ambiguity of“the better man”: Antonius, the one who holds the socially hierarchi-cal role, happens also to hold the morally lesser ground—preciselythe kind of situation that Cicero finesses (conciliates) when he at-tempts to yoke, as if it were unproblematic, seeming good and beinggood. Antonius, however, did not dally with conciliation in the Nor-banus case. He tore loose with the vehement style, which he nowmimics in his treatment of it at second remove. The difference isthat when the style is used in a theoretical treatment of style, thereader is invited to see technique as such, just as in the previouslydiscussed passage on ethos. This is the very opposite of the live or-atorical situation in which the speaker must mask technique. Onlywhen the speeches are seen as a body of work, that is, collected andstudied, does the role of artifice and moral double-dealing becomeapparent. If it were obtrusive in the moment of persuasion, it wouldbe self-defeating.

Since Antonius is the one who narrates the Norbanus passage, itis probable that his willingness to admit a less-than-luminous moralfoundation for his winning defense is related to another need—onethat comes not from the drama described within the Sulpicius storybut from the drama that can be inferred in the social group to whichAntonius is speaking—the audience that composes the dialogue inDe Oratore. That is, Antonius must couch his win in such a way asto mitigate the envy he may arouse in the audience who is listeningto him recount it. He is obviously alert to the dynamic of envy inthe story he tells since he is reliving the emotion that was aroused inhim by the extraordinary rhetorical performance of a younger manwho engaged in heightened aemulatio (socialized envy) and nearlywrested victory from him. It is no surprise, then, that very shortlyafter this anecdote Antonius launches into a fuller discussion of thenature and effects of invidia. In doing so, he allows a more penetratingview of his specious legal win.

Any effort on the part of a speaker to feature his status as a goodman will encounter the hard, cold fact of human envy, which is avice, Antonius tells us, more violent and widespread than any other(2.209). In an intensely competitive world, seeming virtuous necessi-tates other perception-bending screens that can allay an audience’ssuspicion of a speaker’s superiority. No one loves a man who is fullof himself. High achievers and winners run the risk of alienating




themselves from the very people who are their potential idolizersunless they manage their image in the right way by downgradingdistinction and cultivating a rhetoric of humility. An accomplishedstatesman, in other words, recognizes the corrosive effects of envyand learns rhetorically how to counteract them by feigning “greatexertion and great perils” (“how much I suffered to get where I am”)or disclaiming self-interest by shifting advantage to the level of thecommon good (“it is not I who have profited by this victory butyou”).35 He does so because he understands the truth about humannature: we are creatures driven by the hunger to be first, to claim thelion’s share of honor as well as the possessions that go along withthem, and we begrudge others what they have. Is it not the case thatone way of cultivating the rhetoric of humility is to admit, “I won (I’mvery good at winning), but I really didn’t have the moral high groundin that case and was embarrassed to take the stand I did because Iwas, after all, a magistrate charged with protecting morality”? This isa kind of rhetorical discounting that serves the purpose of mollifyingan audience’s potential invidia.

In his urbane way, Antonius brings the problem of envy—particularly his own—dramatically to the fore when he disclosesthat he deliberately dissimulated his view of rhetoric on the first dayof the dialogue in response to the fact that Crassus himself shonelike a god before the group. He agrees that he was taking an overlytechnical approach to rhetoric when he made the orator out to be“some oarsman or porter . . . someone devoid of learning and un-refined.” But he also admits he was posturing when he did so, andfor a simple reason. He wanted to outdo Crassus by defining his ownposition apart: “It was my intention, if I had refuted you, to take thesestudents away from you” (2.40). On the second day of the dialogue,when he holds the floor, Antonius can afford to come around to a lessworkman-like, more humanistic view of the orator—a view nearlyindistinguishable from Crassus’. But he can manage this magnanim-ity because he is enjoying the attention of an audience. His envyhas been allayed by his superiority—by his success in making hislisteners want him. The dynamics of the passage evoke courtship ina triangulated structure of desire: one “lover” competes with anotherto steal the heart of the pursued. It is no surprise that politically gen-

35Crassus discusses in 1.25–27 the rhetorical seemliness of “speaking fearfully(timide),” which conveys an image of pudor and humilitas. Antonius returns to thetheme of rhetorical pudor in his discussion of the “impertinent,” “tactless” Greeks in2.3–7.




erated envy is often implicated in scenarios of courtship, but pointingit out allows us to see that the rhetorical act of identifying with anaudience through the exploitation of opinion, which is the essenceof persuasion, can be tinged with erotic overtones.36

Even the best among men, in their clamor to get to the top,engage in witting deceptions that are bred by rivalry and envy. It ispredictable, given the desire of humans to have more than others,that Cicero regards tyranny as a constant threat to civic order.37 Thepervasiveness of pravitas (depravity), and of invidia, in particular,explains why benevolentia, is always sliding over into its close relative,amor, in De Oratore. The terminological slippage records the need forhyperbole: given the virulence of envy, an equally potent antidote forit must be invented in the rhetorical realm. “Goodwill” cannot standup to an emotion that threatens to swallow everything in a swell ofmalevolence. The bond of identification with the audience, whichis what persuasion is all about, must be inflated into the rhetoricof love—as in the previous scenario—if the divisive force of a greathuman fault is to be overcome. The exaggeration on the rhetoricalscale again reveals the necessity of posing.38

It is somewhat ironic, given the attention to envy in his rhetoricalworks, that Cicero did not handle well the dynamics of envy in hisown public life and frequently got into political trouble for failing toevidence humility toward his achievements. His endless self-praisein the handling of the Catilinian conspiracy is a good example; itirritated and alienated people and specifically fed the animus ofthe populist Clodius who plotted against him.39 But we see here asignal point: Cicero was a novus homo in Rome who frequently feltthe insecurity of having come from a non-aristocratic background.He sometimes showed a certain ineptness in the public relationshe practiced on his own behalf, at least in part because the lack ofillustrious ancestors made him feel he had to keep himself in thepublic eye by ostentation and self-aggrandizing praise. Antoniusand Crassus, his heroes in De Oratore, were from prominent Romanfamilies, fully socialized into the company of elite Roman males,and thus better able to manipulate the rhetoric of self-abnegation—a

36Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18, developed a theory of rhetoric in whichcourtship has a central conceptual role; see especially pp. 208–44.

37See De Officiis 1.8.26; Republic 1. 52, 68; 2. 47–48; and Laws 1.32–33. Wood, Cicero’sSocial and Political Thought, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 179–82, has an excellent discussion.

38On hyberbole in Machiavelli, see Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3above, pp. 25–33.

39See the discussion of Everitt, Cicero, cited in n. 17 above, pp. 113–45.




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

It would be useful, at this point, to study an example taken fromMachiavelli of someone who tried but failed to manage the dynamicsof public envy and distrust. Appius Claudius—a Roman who livedabout 350 years before Antonius and 400 years before Cicero—waschief of the group of ten patricians known as the Decemvirate who in451 BCE were given exceptional powers to adopt a new code of lawsin Rome. Discussing his fate in Discourses 1.40–42, Machiavelli saysthe Decemvirs conducted themselves civilly and modestly underthe leadership of Appius, “a sagacious yet turbulent man” who had“made himself so popular by his manners, that it seemed a wonderhow he could in so short a time have acquired, as it were, a newnature and a new spirit, having until then been regarded as a cruelpersecutor of the people” (1.40). The people, interestingly, neverquite trusted that Appius’ newfound urbanity and affability werereal and remained on guard until, true to his nature, he transgressedin attempting to carry off by violence a patrician woman, Virginia.In doing so, he violated what Machiavelli took to be a prime taboofor a leader against “interfering with the property of his citizensand subjects or with their women” (The Prince, Chapter 17). Hisactions had consequences not only for him but also for the otherDecemvirs, who were forced to abdicate their magistracy. Aboutthis, Machiavelli remarks the following: “besides the other errorscommitted by Appius in attempting to maintain his tyranny, thatof changing too suddenly from one quality to the extreme oppositewas of no little moment” (1.41). His deception, in other words, waspoorly managed—hypocritical in an obvious way. The conclusion isnot hard to draw: though the susceptibility of people to appearancesoffers an opportunity for feigning, a leader must exhibit art in histechnique. Human nature may invite a politics of fraud, but successin manipulating it depends upon the creative talent of the one wholeads. The security of the ruler should be in his own hands and notin that of others, as Machiavelli reiterates in The Prince. Which is tosay that, even more than his actions, his rhetorical presentation of hisactions are his to master. Appius Claudius failed in both.

We are dealing here with a man who exemplifies a cardinalMachiavellian premise about human nature—that it is acquisitiveand given to greed. The difference between Appius Claudius andan effective leader—someone such as Pope Alexander VI in ThePrince, a consummate fox—lies not in their nature but in the factthat one knew how to shape public perception while the other didnot. A political leader is necessarily involved in manipulating the




appearance of moral goodness—to his own “advantage,” Cicerowould say; in satisfying his “acquisitiveness,” Machiavelli wouldsay. For both thinkers, the criterion of the utile controls all others. DeOfficiis, which is centrally involved with an effort to reconcile the utileand the honestum, confirms the point in the case of Cicero, for it ishere that he systematically “elevates the utile to the level of an ethicalcriterion in its own right, making it the norm of the honestum.”40

Cicero and Machiavelli alike concede that it would be nice if wecould both seem good and be good. But since competition and humannature prevent that ideal from being realized, we must retrench toa pragmatic goal: a leader must appear to be good, whatever elsehe might be. Appius Claudius bungled the business; he failed tomask his violence with effective rhetorical screens. Pope AlexanderVI, on the other hand, “never did anything else, never had anotherthought, except to deceive men, and he always found fresh materialto work on. Never was there a man more convincing in his assertions,who sealed his promises with more solemn oaths, and who observedthem less. Yet his deceptions were always successful because he knowexactly how to manage this sort of business” (Chapter 18). Cicero’sdeceivers, at least those he features as models in De Oratore, are notportrayed with quite the animal instincts that govern Machiavelli’scast of characters. But they do exhibit comparable talent as imposters.This emerges from the drama of the dialogue, which evokes thescrappy world of Cicero’s speeches and letters, more than it doesfrom the theoretical program.

This point helps sharpen our thesis. Cicero tries to preserve in hismodel of the ideal orator the kind of close fit between rhetorical prac-tice and the moral self that is belied by the often predatory agonisticposturing of Roman oratory, which was played for extremely highstakes in the late Republic. Cicero’s gruesome death at the hands ofMark Anthony’s henchmen, who severed his head and hands afterkilling him and hoisted them up for public viewing in the Forum,bears chilling witness to this fact. The dialogical drama of De Or-atore mimics this agonistic world and the behaviors characteristicof it, taking care to upgrade motives whenever necessary in orderminimize the strain between theory and practice. Machiavelli, onthe other hand, extremely alert to the strain, collapses practice intotheory. By doing so, he meets head on the challenge of ruling in aworld where, as a general rule, people are “ungrateful, fickle, liarsand deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain” (Chapter 17).

40Colish, “Cicero’s De Officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” cited in n. 13 above.




This is the source of Machiavelli’s famous “primitivism,” that is, hiscultivated style of rendering in the raw language of rhetorical prac-tice the modes of conduct that rhetorical theory had traditionallypatched over. When we hear that “men are so simple of mind andso much dominated by their immediate needs that a deceitful manwill always find plenty who are ready to be deceived”; that a rulermust above all abstain from taking the property of others, “becausemen are quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of a patri-mony”; and that the masses “are always impressed by the superficialappearance of things” (Chapter 18), we are hearing de-euphemizeddescriptions of what Cicero whitewashed. His whitewashing, how-ever, has more than a palimpsestic effect. In De Oratore, the readeris allowed to witness ways in which the principles of being a goodspeaker are complicated or belied in the very act of being proferred.The dialogue, in this sense, may be read as self-deconstructing.

Because he gazes steadily into the maelstrom of a world drivenby the insatiability of the will to acquire and because he comprehendsthe contradictoriness of human want in an environment of limitedresources, Machiavelli’s prince is able to enter into a more complex,self-limiting, and, ironically, more honest dialectical relationship withthose he rules. Not that he reveals his motives—the cases of Borgiaand his father, Alexander VI, demonstrate the need for continuousduplicity—but that being guided by a manual which makes nopretence at idealism, the prince is less likely to be confused by themisguided notion that the best ruler is a good man skilled in speaking.He understands the necessity of hard-boiled practices of governanceand knows that “something resembling virtue, if you follow it, maybe your ruin, while something else resembling vice will lead, if youfollow it, to your security and well-being.” This stance is doublyrhetorical. It requires in the first instance an ability to choose thebest act suited to the situation (what the Greeks called seizing kairos)and in the second an ability to present this choice as morally upright.Even when the prince cannot do the latter, he must be prepared to actshrewdly and wipe up the mess later—for example, through long-term policies that are more easily rendered palatable. Machiavelli’sown rhetoric is notorious because it refuses to comply with thesecond instance—that is, his political theory resolutely rejects thetraditionally sanctioned need for moral whitewashing.

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




how one turns acquisitive motives into forms of “working for thesocial good” or “struggling that the people may have more,” that is,into forms of benign advantage.41 Theory masks self-interest in thetrappings of the res publica, “the common thing.” This is how Cicerodiffers from Machiavelli. And yet the masking frequently appearsas such in De Oratore because the dialogue is highly involved withthe question of technique. It appears, however, through indirection,which amounts to a form of euphemistic deflecting.

We encounter, at this point, a paradox. Despite the sacrificialrhetoric, one often senses that the Ciceronian orator is so consumedby the heroic struggle to be first among equals that his declared inter-est in maintaining the health of the state becomes a pretext screeningthe rivalries of aristocratic males. In Cicero’s own life, the acquisitivewas always rearing its head above the sacrificial—from his numer-ous well-appointed villas (the “gems of Italy,” he called them) to hisself-promoting obsession with publishing his own speeches to hissolicitation of writers to memorialize him in epic-style histories. Thisis not to say that Cicero was not the sincere, eloquent, and bravedefender of the Roman Republic that tradition has passed down tous. It is to say that nothing in the realm of political competition isimmune from the acquisitive motive and, consequently, invidious-ness. This is why imposture is deeply implicated in the vision of civicrepublicanism that emerges from De Oratore. What is so Ciceronianabout this vision is, as we have seen, the rhetoric of concealment thatattends it—the urbanitas of the ethical style that bathes the realityof predatory motives in a soothing golden haze or the ardor of thevehement style that consumes real moral double-dealing in the fireof transport. Cicero’s rhetorics, both those he extols in De Oratore andthose he uses, dissimulate the hypocrisy of the most distinguishedviri boni, who could never rise to the status they enjoy without feign-ing the morality they seem to possess. This is duplicity at two levels,that of the subjects discussed and of the one discussing them. Wecould put it another way: because the text of De Oratore protects aninterest by using terms not incisive enough to critique it thoroughly,its rhetoric verges on cunning.42

Machiavelli’s rhetoric on rhetoric, by contrast, is distinguishedby a harshly naturalistic terminology and a tendency toward exhor-tations about governance—“this is how you maintain the state.” The

41I borrow the term “sacrificial rhetoric” from Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, citedin n. 18 above, pp. 158–66.

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




cold realism of his approach subsumes sacrificial motives to admin-istrative efficacy. Moreover, there is no golden haze that bathes theMachiavellian landscape with the fictional aura of a world that mayone day find the best men cooperating in the interests of achievinguniversal peace. Human motives, as depicted in both The Prince andthe Discourses, are the conditions for a permanent and irremediabledivisiveness that can be overcome only to the extent that a rulermay cooperate with his people in preserving their security and wel-fare. The Machiavellian army is a constant reminder that even if astate reaches a high degree of nationalistic unity, it will have enemiesthreatening its borders or will itself be threatening the borders of an-other. In such circumstances, the interests that the prince protects arespecial interests; his challenge, which is partly empirical and partlyrhetorical, is to take the narrowly special interests that he embodies asone acquisitive individual among many and identify them with thebroader special interests of the state. The process has a pathologicalelement in it that can become frightening when those broader specialinterests are rhetorically fobbed off as the interests of the entire world.This is what can happen with aggressive imperialism, and when it iscombined with the cult of a dictator, we have the case of a Julius Cae-sar, who was “sacrificed” in a political climate that partly faulted himfor lacking adequate sacrificial motives himself—or worse, a Hitlerwho perpetrated genocide as an act of legitimate self-preservationuntil the brute fiction by which he identified himself with the worldrecoiled on him.

Machiavelli exposes and anatomizes the conditions by whichindividuals rise to become rulers. The deception—the fraud—headvocates is necessitated by the fact that what we think we are hasevolved in an inverted relationship to what we really are. This state ofdelusion is the moral fog through which the aspirant to power mustnavigate, and he can only do so by first distancing himself from it,in order to understand it, and then resubmitting himself to it throughrhetorical identification, in order to manipulate it. As scandalous assuch a politics might seem, they are articulated by a man who refusesto submit to the mystification of his predecessors, who refuses todouble the deception about which he speaks by repeating it in hisown account. If we look at it this way, we can see how Cicero is moreMachiavellian than Machiavelli, for the author of The Prince and theDiscourses is not a deceiver at second remove. The entire drama ofstrife and pantomimic morality in Machiavelli’s politics is orientedtoward a less scandalous teaching than the one we have identified inDe Oratore: “when deliberation is wholly concerned with the safetyof the country, no weight should be given to considerations of what is




just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or ignominious; rather,without regard to anything else, one should wholly follow the courseof action that will save the life and maintain the liberty of the country”(Discourses, 3.41).43

Let us, in closing, shift rhetorical registers. Cicero’s princes, ifwe can call them that, always have their best clothes on. When helets us see beyond the aura of their respectability into their tactics, assuch, the effect is voyeuristic; we are allowed a glimpse of what isbeyond appearances, and what we see is naughty. They shouldn’t bebehaving as they do, and we shouldn’t be watching them but we are.There is pleasure in this peeping, the pleasure of being let into thesecrets of those who are privileged, removed from us, godlike. Theeffect of reading Machiavelli is different. His men do what they dobecause they must, given how human societies cohere, and we muststeady ourselves to see them in their unaesthetic nakedness if we areto understand how brutal and relentless their task is—how brutaland relentless we make it. Their bodies are scarred and wounded butintensely muscular. They make us think of what we have come fromthat we thought we had left behind at some unnamed point in timewhen we became civilized. They, like Cicero’s few good men, are anelite, but we hesitate to examine them closely because if we do wewill see imprinted in their bodies the story of who we really are, thestory we prefer to forget, we who wear clothes and pretend that weare what we seem to be. They might be epic heroes if they had adivine machinery to give them grandeur; they might be tragic heroesif they were torn by anguish; they might be picaros if they couldhave more fun and take some time to tilt at windmills.44 But they arehybrids that defy the law of genre. They have taken on the necessityof hiding part of what they are so they can appear like those whohave cut their claws and rounded their fangs, except that sometimesthe claws must come out, the fangs must be bared, if we are to be

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

44Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions, cited in n. 19 above, pp. 135–87, argues for the princeas a kind of epic Odysseus, but his discussion contains contradictions, and ultimately,the extreme self-sufficiency of Odysseus who arrives back in Ithaca with no comradescuts the wrong profile against Machiavelli’s criteria. Others have seen the prince as atragic hero torn by anguish and suffering, but Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,”cited in n. 13 above, effectively discredited this school of thought. N. Struever, Theoryas Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992), 147–81, argues more convincingly for the prince as a picaresque hero.




saved from the folly of our own delusions and the very real troubleto which they can lead.

In both Machiavelli and Cicero we get a strong sense of the mythof power, of power as something made or rather always in the mak-ing, deeply dependent on trapping, display, and adorned language.In both there is an enormous energy that circulates around the creativ-ity of power. But Cicero begins with the orator in splendid array, hismythic aura already enshrouding him, and pulls back only so muchof the regalia as to allow stateliness to be retained. Machiavelli, on theother hand, begins with that bare forked creature, unaccommodatedman, and demonstrates how everything that covers him must bewon in the battle for virtu, the part human, part animal quality ofinnovative daring by which he engenders and ceaselessly recreateshis mythic persona.

What we are left with, in the end, is not a Machiavelli whoseteaching on fraud departs radically from the substance of the human-ist tradition, nor a Machiavelli who is revolutionary in expressingideas about deception that others had known and enacted but neverpublicly advertised.45 Rather, we have a man who boldly drops thepretty talk and blows away the soft aura of Cicero’s Tusculan sunbecause they double the lie; who insists upon a vulgar rhetoric tounmask the ugly truths of ruling; and who obscenely shouts theprince’s secrets because of his cocky certainty that no amount ofdisclosure could ever convince the many of the depth of illusionwith which they live. Only one who looks into the heart of darknessand comprehends the pact that people make with their idols willbe able to listen without being outraged by the outrageous. Such aone is the prince. He alone doesn’t choke on Machiavelli’s bitter pill.If we find resonances of him in the cool, calculating figure of Oc-tavius Caesar—the future Augustus whose monarchical aspirationsCicero miscalculated in the months before he died—then we can alsosee how the last of the great Roman republicans was destroyed, atleast in part, by his only partially demystified views of power. In theend, the real value of Machiavelli may lie in his unswerving candorabout the illusoriness of sacrificial rhetoric, which, in the world ofpolitics and social competition, is always a screen masking invidiousmotives, sometimes extremely dangerous ones.

45The first is the mainstream view; the second that of such rhetorically-mindedcritics as Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5, and Kahn, MachiavellianRhetoric, cited in n. 3.



the frauds of humanism: cicero, machiavelli, and the rhetoric of imposture

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