The force of the Florentine republican tradition is reflected iconographically in the portraits of Caesar in contemporary manuscripts of his works. As Virginia Brown points out, the Florentine codices rarely depict Caesar as a medieval universal ruler holding a globe, thus celebrating the world Empire, but rather as the author of the Commentaries, or as the military leader (figure 23.2). However, Poggio’s antiCaesarian tirade, which earned him the name of‘‘Caesaromastix’’ from Guarino in his reply, marked the high-water mark of anti-monarchical feeling in the fifteenth century. The republican tradition in Florence gradually fell silent as first, in 1434, Cosimo de’ Medici returned from exile, and then, in the second half of the Quattrocento the Medici family tightened its grip on the governance of Florence and its territories, notably in the figure of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Not surprisingly, the critique of single rulers goes underground during this time and only resurfaces with the collapse of Medici rule and the brief return of the republic (1494-1512) in the work of the most famous Florentine republican thinker, Niccolc) Machiavelli (1469-1527). It is no surprise, either, that, under the rule of Lorenzo the Magnificent, his Chancellor Bartolomeo Scala in his History of Florence (c. 1490-7) offers both the Brunian view that Florence was founded under the Roman republic and a restatement of the earlier tradition that it had been founded by Julius Caesar, claiming that as he is unable to decide which is true, all he can say for certain is that the city was founded by Romans. Even the great humanist of Lorenzo’s court, Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), seems to move from a republican to an imperial standpoint: he had originally in 1472 held to the Brunian view that the city was founded by Sulla’s veterans, but later, when dedicating his Latin letters to Lorenzo’s son Piero in 1494, he proclaims that it was
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Figure 23.2 Caesar the military leader at the opening of De Bello Gallico. From a Florentine manuscript, c.1450-1475 (Bodleian Library, Canon. Class. Lat. 266, f. 1r).
Founded not in republican times but by Augustus himself and the other two members of his triumvirate, Mark Antony and Lepidus (Poliziano 2006: 8-16). Poliziano derives his evidence from an old manuscript of the Liber regionum which he attributed to Frontinus, and therefore considered more authoritative than the vague allusions to Fiesole in Cicero’s and Sallust’s accounts of Catiline’s conspiracy. Poliziano’s view became the new orthodoxy throughout the next century and resurfaces in Machiavelli’s, Guicciardini’s and Varchi’s vernacular histories of Florence (Rubinstein 1957). Like Scala, even Machiavelli, when he is commissioned by the Medici Pope Clement VII to write his Florentine Histories (1524), subscribes both to Bruni’s republican theory of the founding of Florence and to Poliziano’s ‘‘imperial’’ theory of the triumvirate of Augustus as founders, stating that, following the wars between Marius and Sulla, and Caesar and Pompey, and afterwards between Caesar’s killers and his avengers, first Sulla and later the triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus sent colonists to settle Fiesole (Machiavelli 1988: Istorie fiorentine 2.2).
Machiavelli’s more critical views of Caesar are to be found in his two most famous political treatises. In The Prince (1513), Julius Caesar receives just one significant mention, when Machiavelli notes that the dictator, who had gained power through his munificence, would never have been able to sustain that level of spending had he lasted in office (Machiavelli 2005: ch. 16). However, his critique of Caesar is much more explicit and wide-ranging in the more republican Discourses on the First Decade of Livy (1516-17). The longest chapter to deal with Caesar suggests that Machiavelli knew the polemic between Poggio and Guarino, for he says that all rulers would prefer their citizens to be more like Scipio than Caesar (Machiavelli 2003: Discorsi 1.10). He then adds that Caesar's fame is due to the fear of writers under all the emperors: if authors had been free they would have said of Julius what they said of Catiline (interestingly, that is what Poggio had done). That Machiavelli is working within the Florentine-Tacitean tradition is confirmed when he then translates almost verbatim the whole of the second paragraph from the Histories (1.2), about the emperors bringing destruction on Italy, the burning of Rome, the profanation of religion, and the rewarding of wickedness. After this long list of outrages, which Tacitus had balanced with a list of instances of virtuous behavior (Histories 1.3), Machiavelli ignores these positive examples, simply adding a sardonic sentence of his own: ‘‘[Anyone who considers all these outrages], will recognize clearly how much Rome, Italy and the world owe to Caesar’’ (1.10). Elsewhere he notes that Caesar blinded people so they could not see the yoke he put on them (1.17), that his favor turned into fear (1.33), that he was the first tyrant in Rome (1.37), and so on. Machiavelli's denunciation in this republican treatise finds a number of echoes in the works of like-minded contemporaries, such as Francesco Patrizi and Francesco Guicciardini. Patrizi’s Institution of a Republic (published 1518) sees Caesar as the usurper of the republic and an architect of tyranny; while Guicciardini in the Con-siderazioni (c. 1528) saw him as ‘‘detestable and monstrous’’ in setting up a tyranny against the wishes ofits people (Guicciardini 1984; Skinner 1978: I, 161). However, although the Florentine republic revived briefly just after Machiavelli’s death in 1527, once Medici power was definitively restored in 1530 the family remained in power for two centuries, and the anti-imperial note that had characterized Florentine political writings for over a century fell completely silent.
We saw that Machiavelli embraced the Caesarian foundation of Florence in his Medici-inspired Florentine Histories, and in another work of the same time, The Art of War (1520), he is even more positive about Caesar. In this work there is only praise of Caesar the general and strategist. He praises the brilliant tactician, seeing him as a model to follow in the way he trusted the infantry more than the cavalry (book 2; Machiavelli 1965: 55-6), the way he followed up a victory with great speed, unlike Hannibal, or attacked his enemy while they were crossing a stream (book 4, p. 120), how he cleverly had a bridge constructed while distracting his enemy by marching up one side of a river (book 5, pp. 146-7), and how he avoided fighting German tribes when they were desperate (book 6, p. 278). In the last page, Caesar and Alexander are cited as models for contemporary rulers for their willingness to endure hardship, and to march and fight alongside their own soldiers (book 7, p. 211). Only at this last mention does Machiavelli insert a brief reminder of his earlier criticism of
Caesar: although the ‘‘inordinate thirst for dominion’’ in some rulers is criticized, they certainly cannot be accused of effeminacy or cowardice (p. 211) - though the former accusation may be ironic given Caesar’s and Alexander’s ambivalent sexual reputations. But on the whole, Julius is the hero of Machiavelli’s dialogue on war as much as he had been the villain of his republican Discourses. This was a harbinger of things to come: once the Florentine republic collapsed definitively, there began two centuries of foreign rule, Italians forgot about the ideological question of republic versus monarchy, and were left to admire Caesar the author and military strategist. It is to this last strand that we now turn.
World History
