Machiavelli and the Rape of Lucretia, by Yves Winter
Source: https://www.academia.edu/70175320/Machiavelli_and_the_rape_of_Lucretia
Abstract: ... Unlike his Roman and Renaissance sources, Machiavelli downplays the rape and suicide, denying the causal role in the revolution that his predecessors had routinely attributed to it. This dismissal of Lucretia’s rape and suicide is surprising both in view of the importance Machiavelli accords to public spectacles of violence in founding political institutions and because the case of Lucretia appears to corroborate his persistent warning to princes to abstain from sexually assaulting their subject women. This article examines the reasons behind Machiavelli’s sceptical attitude towards Lucretia and argues that the refusal to extol Lucretia as a republican hero stems from his rejection of a central ethical premise and rhetorical trope of republicanism: the idea that sexual virtue is a synecdoche for political virtue.
The Importance of the Lucretia Myth to the Renaissance
The Lucretia myth went through a veritable revival in Renaissance Florence. It was a cornerstone of Francesco Petrarch’s fourteenth-century reimagination of Roman mythology, history, literature and poetry. [note 37]
p. 414
[note 37] Petrarch explores the Lucretia motif in four of his major works and arguably exceeds even Livy in the way he invests Lucretia with heroic status.
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See: Francesco Petrarca, The Canzoniere, or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, trans. Mark Musa, ed. Mark Musaand Barbara Manfredi (Bloomington, 1999), 260.9, 262.9–11, 360.97–100; Francesco
Petrarca, ‘The Triumph of Chastity’, in Petrarch in English, trans. Anna Hume, ed.
Thomas P. Roche (London, 2005); Francesco Petrarca, De viris illustribus, ed. Guido
Martellotti (Florence, 1964); Francesco Petrarca, L’Africa, ed. Nicola Festa (Florence,
1926), 3.643–802.
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Why was the Lucretia myth so important?
For Petrarch and his humanist students, the revival of the Roman tradition involved a comprehensive programme of fashioning Roman virtues, values and traditions for their Italian contemporaries. With its condensation of moral and political allegories, the Lucretia story lends itself uniquely to this project. Accordingly, the Lucretia motif was taken up by Renaissance poets from Fazio degli Uberti through Giovanni Boccaccio to Matteo Bandello along with various anonymous authors; by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters like Botticelli, Titian and Veronese; and it was a popular subject in Renaissance Tuscan domestic painting, such as on wedding chests and wall panels. The most extensive discussion is in a widely circulated text written by the Florentine humanist and chancellor of the republic Coluccio Salutati: his Declamatio Lucretiae.
Salutati's Declamatio Lucretiae
Lucretia's father and husband try to persuade her that she is innocent and chaste:
‘Are not the cruelty of the father [crudelitas patris] and the monstrosity of his children [immanitas filiorum] well known to you?’ In their efforts to persuade Lucretia of her innocence, her father and husband stress that it is Sextus alone who was violent and that Lucretia’s soul remained ‘most chaste during the violence of copulation [mentem intra concubitus violentiam pudicissimam conservasti]’. Yet Lucretia refuses to budge, arguing that only suicide can restore her honour, because it will prove that she prefers to die chaste than to live as an adulteress. In return, she demands that her husband and father avenge her violation ‘by the sword’, insisting that it is ‘your responsibility, if there is anything in you of Roman spirit, to avenge such a crime’. Indeed, in Salutati’s version, Lucretia presents her courage as a model for the men to emulate.
pp. 415-416
Machiavelli would have been familiar with all this, so why does he minimize the violence done to Lucretia and not allow that "the rape of Lucretia as a quintessential moment of the sort of rapacity that undoes states?":
Indeed, Machiavelli appears to recognize just that, for he mentions Lucretia in the chapter in the Discourses on how women ruin states. There he writes that ‘the excess done against Lucretia took the state away from the Tarquins’ [Discourses 3. 26], directly contradicting the earlier claim that Tarquin the Proud ‘was expelled not because his son Sextus had raped Lucretia but because he had broken the laws of the kingdom and governed it tyrannically’ [Ibid 3.5]. Was it the crime against Lucretia that brought about the Tarquins’ downfall or was it the royals’ general lawlessness and tyranny of which Lucretia was but an epiphenomenon?
p. 416
Interpreting Machiavelli's Silence
... even in Discourses 3.26, it is not Lucretia’s suicidal action that makes her a relevant figure but rather the ‘excess done against’ her [lo eccesso fatto contro a Lucrezia]. In other words, even when Machiavelli does acknowledge Lucretia’s role, it is only as a patient and not as an agent of history in the strong sense.
p. 417
Yves Winter questions Machiavelli's claim in Discourses 3.7 that the Roman revolution injured none but the Tarquins since Lucretia was raped and committed suicide:
it is clear that Lucretia does not count as ‘anyone else [qualunque altro]’; her injury is not legible as politically or historically relevant. By denying her status as qualunque altro, Machiavelli codifies her rape as private, unpolitical and historically trivial.
p. 418
However, the rape and suicide of Lucretia as told by Livy, take place BEFORE the revolution. She is NOT harmed by the revolution but by events that precede it and, by the opportunism of Brutus, trigger it.
The gloss of feminist critics (Susan Okin, Carole Pateman, Hanna Pitkin) unsatisfactory, according to Yves Winter.
First, explaining the exclusion of the rape scene as a function of Machiavelli’s general misogyny implies that the representation of rape in historical narrative and founding myths is somehow a more progressive, more gender-egalitarian and less patriarchal stance. Yet, as I will argue more fully below, it is not at all clear that narrations of rape and suicide as founding stories are more feminist than their disavowal. Second, the place of violence against women in Machiavelli’s work is more complicated than simply that of an elision designed to keep woman out of the political world.
p. 418
- Case 1: Giovanna II of Naples, Florentine Histories
- Case 2: Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forli, Prince, Discourses, Florentine Histories, Art of War
Machiavelli also refers to Dido as "a new prince" [Prince 17]
Unlike those princely women, Lucretia lacks a state, and does not seek one.
Lucretia will never rule, because she prefers death to dishonour. Successful female princes, it would seem, exercise power by acting gender-atypically and by flouting conventional gender norms (although Virgil’s Dido, madly in love, passionate and erratic, hews more closely to the sexist stereotype). Indeed, one of the well-founded[?] criticisms of Machiavelli’s representation of these female princes is that they can only attain the rank of prince by being re-gendered as masculine. Lucretia does the contrary: she sacrifices herself in the name of upholding such norms. Yet while this may explain why she is not a paradigmatic
female prince, it does not shed light on why she is marginalized as a victim of
sexual violence.
p. 420
Machiavelli Rejects Lucretia's Sacrificial Status
Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History
Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking
Drawing on the work of the ancient historian Ettore Pais, Jed argues that the Roman historians may, in fact, have appropriated the tale from neighbouring Latin tribes. If Jed and Pais are right about the borrowed status of the saga, this would indicate that the narrative meets certain discursive requirements for an origin story. In other words, the myth of Lucretia might be understood as responding to a narrative exigency concerning the origins of the Republic. Analogously, Jed argues that the Lucretia legend satisfied ‘the need of the Florentines for an image of political integrity in the struggle against tyranny’. One way to think about such exigencies is through the difficulty of consolidating political change, a problem that is pivotal to both Machiavelli’s The Prince and the Discourses.
p 421
Machiavelli's asymmetrical treatment of Lucretia and Brutus.
According to Jerome, Lucretia is the equal of if not superior to Brutus,
'since Brutus learnt from a woman the impossibility of being a slave' [St. Jerome, Against Jovinianus]
p. 422
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/30091.htm [46: Lucretia; 49: Lucretia not inferior to Brutus]
Yet by extolling Brutus and disavowing Lucretia, Machiavelli denies the similarity between the two. On the one hand, Machiavelli contends that it was not the ‘accident’ of Lucretia’s rape but the tyrannical conditions that caused the uprising against the Tarquins; on the other hand, he regards Brutus’s execution of his sons as cause of the successful republican transition. In one case, the violence is accidental and contingent; in the other case, it is necessary and paradigmatic. Demurring to the Roman and humanist traditions, Machiavelli denies the conventional republican emplotment of Lucretia’s rape and suicide and substitutes the killing of Brutus’s male children for the founding violence of the Republic. While he does not challenge the premise that political change requires narratives of violence, he implies that some stories fulfil this role better than others and that rape stories, or at least Lucretia’s rape and suicide, are not adequate violent
origin stories.
pp. 422-423
Republican Chastity
The contrast between Lucretia’s violated body and her pure spirit highlights the theme of chastity that is central to the way early modern republican humanists narrate the myth. For instance, the early fifteenth-century treatise ‘On Wifely Duties’ authored by the Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro, teaches chastity and frugality and calls on women to emulate Lucretia rather than Cleopatra. But whereas for Barbaro, Lucretia’s chastity remains a private moral virtue, for Petrarch, Salutati and Bruni, it metaphorizes the righteousness and integrity of the Roman revolt against tyranny. Thus for the civic ideology of humanist republicanism, Lucretia’s plight acquires political value to the extent that sexual virtue becomes an allegory for political freedom.
p. 424
Like Livy, Machiavelli thinks republics are more likely to generate sexual virtue than principalities. His praise for Scipio for returning a female prisoner to her lover, Discourses 3. 20.
Yet, unlike his Roman and Florentine predecessors, Machiavelli has no use for sexual purity. In contrast to Livy’s, Petrarch’s and Salutati’s exaltations of female sexual abstinence and chastity, Machiavelli refuses to accept sexual probity as a proxy for moral, let alone political virtue.
p 426
In particular,
Machiavelli rejects a basic tenet of civic humanism: that the moral virtue of the ruling class is the condition for good government and that such virtue is instilled by a classical education and best practised in republican competition for public honours.
p. 426
the Lucretia myth represents a perfect condensation of the moral and political lessons of civic humanism. It narrates the political downfall of a corrupt royal family as a direct result of moral vice and sexual crime; and I suggest that this is precisely the bone of contention in the conventional emplotment of the myth. Machiavelli downplays the role of the Roman kings’ sexual crimes in their downfall on grounds of his deep suspicions against moralism.
p 426
Norms of sexual purity where part of the "pious discourse' of the piagnoni of Savonarola.
Note 96
While he served as Secretary in the Florentine Chancery, an anonymous letter implicated him in inappropriate sexual acts with another ‘Lucrezia’, a prostitute whom he was known to frequent and whom he was accused of having sodomized.
p. 527
Machiavelli's Focus on Class Conflict as the Cause of the Rebellion
In contrast to the Roman historians for whom Lucretia’s violation and suicide causes the overthrow of the monarchy, Machiavelli emphasizes structural factors. The rebellion against the Tarquins, he argues, was fuelled by the conflict between the monarchy and the nobility for power and authority and by the discontent of plebeian workers over the surplus hard labour extracted from them. The focus on class signals a shift away from the heroic characters of Lucretia, Brutus and Collatinus and towards a historiography that observes social conditions as determinants of historical change.
p. 527
Lucretia as Comedy #3
In Mandragola, Machiavelli parodies the myth of Lucretia by turning it into a story of wife-stealing and adultery:
Machiavelli's Lucretia is not raped but takes the adulter Callimaco as her lover, enjoys his company and invites him back.
p. 429
Rather than interpreting Lucrezia’s assent to adultery as evidence for the unmitigated corruption of civic life, we can read the comedy as an acerbic commentary on both the pious moralism as well as the metanormative premises concerning the relation between sexual and political virtue that animate conventional accounts of the myth.
pp. 429-430
Conclusion
Machiavelli refuses to extol Lucretia as a republican hero because he rejects a key metanormative premise and rhetorical trope of civic humanism, namely the idea that sexual virtue is a synecdoche for political virtue. If, as Machiavelli insists, conventional norms of moral probity are not convertible with political virtue but are frequently at odds, then chastity is a poor template for republican virtue or freedom. By extension, if chastity cannot symbolize republican virtue, then the entire sequence of the myth as put forward by Livy, Petrarch, Salutati and Bruni is compromised.
Yet Machiavelli seems to assign to political violence an incoherent and contradictory political value, one that cannot easily be resolved by references to conventional patriarchal norms of sexual virtue nor by norms of representation in feminist historiography. Rather than interpreting the gendered gaps in Machiavelli’s political theory as evidence of the exclusion of women from the political fold, I think they make possible a symbolically productive incoherence.
p. 431