BOOK: Poggio Bracciolini, "On Leaders and Tyrants"

Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino of Verona, Pietro del Monte: On Leaders and Tyrants. Edited and translated by Hester Schadee, Keith Sidwell, with David Rundle. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 99. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674297128. xlvii + 566 pp.

This book is about a somewhat unusual subject: a minor controversy that took place amongst several humanist authors, in 1440, about whether Scipio Africanus was more excellent and virtuous than Julius Caesar, or vice versa. Actually we've had one somewhat similar book in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before, Ciceronian Controversies from 2007 (see my post about it); but the pieces that compose the present volume are a bit longer and come from a less numerous cast of authors.

Anyway, while the topic is perhaps a bit obscure, it wasn't too hard to relate to. This whole debate reminded me a little of the sort of arguments that nerds might have nowadays about this or that figure from some science fiction or fantasy franchise; and I guess you could say that the Renaissance-era humanists were fans of ancient Roman civilization in a way not entirely unlike how some people today might be fans of Star Trek or Star Wars or things like that.

On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar

The controversy begins with a short piece by Poggio Bracciolini titled On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar. This is shorter than most of the subsequent works in this volume, and was in many ways my favourite. Poggio gives a brief overview of the careers of both men, and I found the part about Scipio particularly interesting since I knew very little about him. I knew, of course, that he had been one of the leading Roman generals from the Second Punic War, but not much else; I remember reading a book about the Punic Wars many years ago and there must have been something about Scipio there, but I remembered nothing at all.

Poggio clearly considered Scipio to be a vastly more virtuous and excellent figure than Caesar, and from what we see of Scipio's and Caesar's life and actions here in Poggio's account, I was happy to agree with him. Admittedly I had disliked Caesar from before, and Poggio's essay didn't change my opinion about him in any way; as for Scipio, the account of his career that we get here is so glowing and impressive that I couldn't help wondering if there was some bias, either on the part of Poggio or of his sources. For example, there is of course plenty of dirt on Caesar in Suetonius's biography of him, as there is on every of the twelve emperors of whom Suetonius wrote biographies; and we might have had some dirt on Scipio too, if someone like Suetonius had written a biography of him, but no one seems to have done so (“The life of Scipio [. . .] was not written down by any of the ancients”, ¶13). My approval of Scipio might even have grown to admiration, were it not for the fact that I support the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars, so that I can't wholeheartedly approve of a general that fought *against* the Carthaginians. But even if Scipio was an instrument of Roman imperialism, Caesar was even more so; and so Scipio comes out looking better than Caesar anyway.

Speaking of Suetonius, Poggio also uses him as his source for various juicy and unfavourable remarks on Caesar's private life: “Caesar's early years, when he first joined the barracks, were not short of disrepute, for he was sometimes called ‘the bedstead of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia’ and ‘queen’ ” (¶4). “That Caesar was a man of immoderate lust is reported by Suetonius, who makes reference to his very many acts of fornication and adultery. That he was rapacious and covetous of other people's property is generally agreed” etc. (¶10). By contrast, “Scipio's youth is marked both by the most excellent conduct and by honorable deeds, and full of self-restraint, chastity, and modesty; but that of Caesar is reproached by all, and stained by outrages and infamy” (¶20).

But, of course, the main part of the comparison between these two men must concern their public careers. Scipio's conquest of Spain early in his career (¶17) seems to have been a good deal less bloodthirsty than the sort of wholesale genocides that one usually associates with Caesar's conquest of Gaul. And later, after his victory over Hannibal, he refused numerous extraordinary honours which the senate and the people offered him (¶19). Still later, when “his power had grown to the extent that, as Seneca reports, ‘it would become inavoidable that either Scipio must injure liberty, or liberty Scipio,’ [. . .] he left for voluntary exile in Liternum, lest by his presence he violate the liberty of the community” (¶20).* What a tremendous contrast in comparison with Caesar, who amassed power and offices with all the furious greed of a rodent on steroids...

[*Scipio died while in exile in Liternum (p. 476, n. 44), and “declined burial in the family tomb in Rome”; his tombstone bore the inscription “Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones” (ibid., n. 46).]

One curious detail that provides such a neat contrast between them that I couldn't help wondering how much I should trust it: they apparently both had interesting encounters with pirates. That of Caesar, of course, is well known: he got captured by pirates, joked to them that he would have them crucified, and after getting ransomed he gathered a small fleet, caught up with the pirates and kept his promise. By contrast, Scipio's pirate encounter was very different (and quite new to me): “These virtues had earned Scipio so much standing, so much veneration among all that, when he was in exile near Liternum, pirates came to him, revering him as though some divine power: they gave worship at the doorstep of his house as if it were a temple, and once they had placed gifts before the entrance as before some sacred place, they kissed Scipio's hand and left” (¶20). Sure, Caesar comes across as a badass, but also as something of an asshole; meanwhile, Scipio comes across as a paragon, virtuous to a super-humanly (and implausibly) ideal degree.

Anyway, although I enjoyed Poggio's bashing of Caesar (“we find nothing in Caesar's life that deserves worthily to be praised, except for his deeds done in war”, ¶12; “there is nothing on record on which Caesar could leave any trace of his virtue”, ¶21), and read with interest his praises of Scipio, ultimately most of these details are in some sense insignificant compared to the big and obvious difference between them: Scipio had gone out of his way to avoid amassing too much political power in a way that could have harmed the country, while by contrast Caesar went out of his way to gather all the power in his hands, thereby preparing the ground of the reintroduction of monarchy in Rome.

Thus, ultimately, whether you prefer Scipio or Caesar must depend on your attitude towards the monarchy-vs-republic question. I imagine that many people, both in Poggio's time and in other periods, looked with dismay at the turbulent history of republics, both in ancient Greece and Rome, or in renaissance Italy, and decided that monarchy was the preferable option as being more likely to lead to stability; and such people would probably admire Caesar for putting the rotten Roman republic out of its misery and bringing an end to a century of civil wars. I, however, can't regard the introduction of empire in Rome as anything other than a disaster; within a couple of generations they went from people like Caesar or Augustus, who despite their faults were at least capable politicians and administrators, to full-blown lunatics and psychopaths like Nero and Caligula; and they soon had plenty of civil wars again too, as ambitious generals began fighting each other for a chance to become emperor. For all its problems, and they were many, the Roman republic is surely infinitely preferable to the empire that followed it.

Poggio himself is clearly on the side of the republic here, perhaps because he himself was from one (Florence). “Scipio spurned the dictatorship he was offered, Caesar extorted it. One preserved the freedom of his people, the other reduced them to the most pitiful slavery.” (¶24.) In view of all this, the contest between Scipio and Caesar as to who is more excellent and virtuous is not only not close, it's almost completely one-sided; Caesar never stood a chance, and I was happy to see him thoroughly defeated; Scipio comes across as so obviously more virtuous that it's hard to see how Caesar could ever have been seen even as a serious contender.

The debate continues

For me, that first short essay by Poggio was the most interesting part of the book, and the rest of the documents from the controversy don't really add much to it. Another humanist intellectual, Guarino of Verona (also a noted teacher; in one of the early ITRL volumes, Humanist Educational Treatises, there's a treatise by his son, based on Guarino's methods), evidently took exception to Poggio's position and wrote a rebuttal, On the Excellence of Caesar and Scipio, which despite the title is mostly a defense of Caesar (of whom Guarino appears to have been a keen, long-time fan; p. 231). It is much longer than Poggio's essay, and not nearly as interesting; but what I disliked most about it is the rather high-blown rhetorical style in which it is written, constantly addressing Poggio directly and upbraiding him sternly for his supposed errors and shortcomings.

Much of what Guarino does is nitpicking at various little details that Poggio got wrong, or quibbling with small parts of his argument; there's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it has no chance of altering the ultimate conclusion (i.e. that Scipio is better than Caesar). For example, Poggio at some point blames Caesar for the decline of Latin literature in the wake of his reign; Guarino objects and points out the many important authors who flourished after Caesar's time. I'm perfectly willing to agree with Guarino on this particular detail; and moreover, to blame Caesar for any decline in Latin literature is silly because such a decline was inevitable anyway; no golden age lasts for very long, so there was bound to be a decline after Caesar's time regardless of what he did or didn't do. If nothing else, the language was changing, as any living language does; and in most cases, language change is a form of decline; a language usually changes for the worse, not for the better. The Romans, recognizing this, strove to keep on writing in the language of the classical period, and so not unnaturally got the worse at it the more their everyday speech differed from the classical language.

Another example where I agree with Guarino's quibble is where Poggio tried to denigrate Caesar's military successes by suggesting that the Gauls were “a barbarous and wild people, but unused to war” (¶22, p. 29), which is obviously quite absurd, and Guarino cites various authorities to that effect, concluding “that the Gallic people were at no time unused to war” and “were terrifying in arms” (¶57, p. 107).

On the other hand, some of Guarino's quibbles are completely bizarre. When Poggio talks about Caesar's lustful immorality and mentions his affair with Cleopatra as an example, Guarino replies by pointing out that Scipio “was once ensnared by love for a domestic slave and [. . .] surrendered to love”; “which of the two is more deserving of excuse? The man who loved a queen, or the one who loved a servant girl? The man who loved such a beauty that her age produced no finer, or the one who loved an ugly slave?” (¶54). Bold of him to assume that the slave-girl can't have been pretty; and for that matter, who is to say that Cleopatra's beauty can't have been a bit exaggerated by propaganda and then uncritically passed on by ancient historians? (Poggio, in ¶82 of his reply (p. 209), says about Cleopatra being pretty that “Plutarch writes the opposite”, and he mocks Guarino for writing as if he knew that Scipio's slave-girl was ugly.)

Anyway, Guarino, of course, knows that picking on details such as these can't change the argument in favour of Caesar, and so also defends the latter more directly; in his view, Caesar brought much-needed stability to the Roman state; he did not destroy Roman liberty, which “had long since been destroyed, though people still lived in her shadow” (¶60); under him, the fundamental structure of its government didn't change much, and the people were freer than before, being now liberated of the burden of civil strife. I don't doubt that many Romans in Caesar's time saw it that way themselves; his popularity attests to that; but in the long term their acquiescence in the introduction of monarchy was disastrous, and their descendants paid for it by living as subjects to a long series of horrible emperors.

Guarino's treatise provoked an equally long (or even slightly longer) response from Poggio, titled Defense of ‘On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar’, where Poggio goes into more details that he obviously couldn't go into when writing his original short essay, but on the whole this doesn't really have much potential to affect the outcome of the dispute. By the time you get to this point, you have surely already cast your lot either with Scipio or with Caesar, and you aren't likely to change your mind.

Poggio admits that Caesar does deserve some praise, just not as much as Scipio; “in Caesar there were very great outrages, but none in Scipio” (¶81, p. 207).

One thing where I definitely did symphathize with Poggio in his response was the way he objects not to the fact that Guarino disagreed with him, but to the manner of Guarino's disagreement. Poggio emphasizes that he wrote his opinion and that everyone is free to disagree (though he clearly also thinks that Guarino is being a bit silly with his pro-Caesar position); but since Guarino's response attacked him personally and constantly upbraided him in much too strong terms, he felt obliged to defend himself. (I'm guessing that Guarino had momentarily forgotten that he wasn't dealing with one of his students, who were presumably used to being upbraided by him in this manner.)

Poggio even mocks Guarino by saying that “I, for one, would not have believed this to be his work had it not been signed ‘Guarino’ [. . .] would reckon it had been cobbled together by some ranter in the market place and worthless litigator” (¶1, p. 129). Reminds me of that well-known line: “some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters” :))

Both Poggio and Guarino tried to interest other intellectuals and even various members of the ruling class in the debate, with some success, and the last piece here is a letter to Poggio from Pietro del Monte, a church official who lived in London at the time. (There he even got the Duke of Gloucester (son of King Henry IV) interested in the dispute; ¶6.) Pietro (who was a friend of Poggio's and a former student of Guarino's; ¶1, 4) fully agrees with Poggio, both as regards the original dispute about Caesar and Scipio, as well as regarding the fact that Guarino's response was too personal and that Poggio was right to respond to it in turn. Pietro also provides some more quotations from ancient sources in support of his (and Poggio's) position. I was glad enough to see that we are all (except Guarino) mostly in agreement, but other than that Pietro's letter doesn't change anything substantial about the debate (and it wouldn't be reasonable to expect it to do so), and isn't likely to change anybody's mind.

I liked the part where Pietro compares Caesar to an earlier Roman tyrant, Tarquin the Proud; the expulsion of the latter was generally held to have been praiseworthy; and Caesar being even worse than Tarquin, “the case for killing Caesar was far more just and persuasive than that for expelling Tarquin” (¶32), and he approves full-throatedly of the assassination: “I could never praise worthily enough that deed of the best citizens” (ibid.).

On the Unhappiness of Leaders

Lastly, this volume also contains another work by Poggio, not related to the Scipio/Caesar controversy (though there is a mention of Caesar in C27 here, as an example of how rulers are generally not good people). It is a longish treatise titled On the Unhappiness of Leaders, and though technically in the form of a dialogue involving Poggio and three other learned men, the character of Poggio says very little in it and most of the talking is done by another speaker, Niccolò Niccoli, who I guess represents Poggio's actual views on the subject. He defends, at considerable length and illustrated by countless examples, mostly from ancient history but also a few more recent ones, the idea that “leaders” * aren't (and mostly can't be) happy (“there is no bond between leaders and happiness”, C18). The other speakers occasionally venture minor objections or try to soften his position somewhat, but Niccolò — who seems to be something of a Cynic and has much of the abrasiveness that traditionally went with that philosophical school — mostly just brushes them aside and keeps going (C40).

[*This is how the word principes is translated here, and I wonder why the translators don't say “rulers” or even “princes” instead; surely this would have suited the dialogue better, since pretty much all the examples in it are of monarchs; no other form of leadership is even hinted at. Poggio explicitly writes that “under this heading I want to include emperors, kings, dukes and the rest who hold sway over others” (C18).]

This is the sort of discussion that, although in a sense interesting, nevertheless gets tiresome fairly quickly, since so much of it hinges on how you define happiness. It soon became clear to me that Poggio's understanding of this word is different from mine. He (or should I say Niccolò as one of the characters in the dialogue) points out, for example, that leaders are prone to all sorts of vices and faults, since there is nothing much that would restrain them; the position of a leader “is bound either to corrupt even the good or to wear them out so thoroughly that they can have no taste of happiness” (C28); “ruling corrupts its possessors with a multitude of mental diseases” (C31). The very few who don't get corrupted will still be unhappy because of all the cares and burdens of their position (C18).

Diogenes himself would be proud of Niccolò when he says that “the things which Carlo cited as conducive to gaining happiness, namely riches, resources, the ability to do things, [. . .], these seem rather to be incitements to and instruments of unhappiness than of happiness.” (C32) He finds fault with everything; leaders “fear poison and ambushes set by their friends. Feasts and drinking sessions engender suspicion” etc. (ibid.; cf. also C56–57). Indeed good rulers “have been rarer than the Stoics' sage” (C37). I particularly liked the following sentiment by Niccolò, though I'm not sure if it's meant to be only anti-monarchism or full-blown anarchism: “with how many disasters the desire for power has afflicted the world [. . .] those men appear worthy of execration who first gave to one man what belonged to everyone and who, subjugating the freedom under which they were born to slavery, preferred one person to have more power than everyone else” (C38); “the position of leader is by nature a bad thing” (C40). To the suggestion that some rulers haven't been that bad, he replies simply that “they have been rarer than monsters and miracles” (ibid.)

This is all well and good, and I'm always glad to see rulers being bashed, but what on earth does it all have to do with happiness? Here we come to the crux of the matter. Niccolò turns to ancient authorities as to what happiness even is: “Aristotle tells us [. . .] that happiness is obtained through the exercise of the virtues. Our own Cicero wishes it to be prosperity in honorable matters or a fortune which aids good counsels, and the person who does not experience these cannot by any means be happy. Hence where virtues or good counsels are lacking, where vices are present, in that place there cannot exist any happiness.” (C46) Later Niccolò tells us his own opinion (and, commendably, says he will not define happiness as narrowly as the Stoics would): “happiness follows a mind which is peaceful, at liberty and free of all disturbance” (C84), which he insists a ruler can't possibly be.

Well, at this point the whole dialogue started to feel a bit superfluous; with such a cunning definition of happiness it is of course blindingly obvious that rulers can't be happy. But the definitions he quoted clearly come from moralists who are trying to manipulate us into behaving virtuously by dangling the prospect of happiness before us like some sort of carrot. Our everyday notion of happiness is surely much wider than that; it's an emotion that people feel, sometimes for shorter and sometimes for longer periods, under various circumstances (and I suppose that modern-day science could tell us precisely which hormones are flooding our brains at that particular moment, and which gland emits them, and I'm frankly surprised why we can't buy them in the form of pills yet).

I could very easily imagine a leader being happy; if he has a reasonably well-organized court, he doesn't have to be as paranoid and suspicious all the time as Niccolò suggests; if he has the slightest sense of delegation (a concept which Niccolò never even hints at), he can hand over much of his work to ministers, advisors, etc., and so avoid being overburdened with the business of running the state (which Niccolò often mentions as one of the things that makes rulers unhappy); and then, if he doesn't have too complicated a personality, he can devote himself to enjoying the pomp and ceremony of his court, the feasting and drinking, the musical and theatrical entertainments, he can chat with his friends, he can dally with his concubines, he can go out hunting — heck, he could even dabble in the arts or whatever other hobbies he might be into; he can, in short, be as happy as a pig in the mud. At least he would call himself happy, and you and I would call him happy; but Aristotle and Cicero and Niccolò wouldn't, I suppose.

Later Niccolò lists many instances of cruelties perpetrated by various rulers (especially the killing of family members as potential rivals) and asks rhetorically: “Do you think that among so many and so foul and monstrous crimes any trace of happiness is left?” (C76) But if he cites authorities concerning the nature of happiness, I can do that as well: “One might kill and rob and yet be happy” — Rostov in Tolstoy's War and Peace, book 4, ch. 15. :]

Niccolò also likes to exaggerate the cares and burdens of a ruler's position; “those who think they are in control, are in fact the slaves of everyone” (C85); “a good leader” is “as it were the public slave of everyone” (C87). But, surely, the solution to this is very simple; don't worry too much about being the perfect leader; don't try to micromanage everything; by igoring some of the work and delegating some of the rest, I'm sure the burdens of leadership can be whittled down to something very tolerable.

Towards the end, the author can't resist tooting his own horn a bit; “it is not among leaders, but among private individuals that happiness is sometimes found” (C97), that is if they are virtuous and pursue “wisdom and learning” (C98); “their mind, removed from ambition, free from desire, is content with what is their own, not seeking what is someone else's, they live freely and make their adherents happy” (ibid.); “if any people seek happiness, they should realize that it has its abode not in the position of leader but in virtue and the blessed life” (C102).

Now, I'm perfectly willing to agree that the life of a (preferably independently wealthy*) scholar-intellectual who doesn't seek public office could indeed be very happy; I just disagree that the concept of happiness should be defined so narrowly. Most people, from most walks of life, can be happy from time to time, and pretty much nobody will be happy all the time, since that just isn't how our brain works. Happiness is not confined to any particular segment of society, and it's nonsense to say that rulers aren't, and can't ever be, happy.

[*He adds later: “I would not call leaders more unhappy than those who hang on the leader's nod in their desire for external things”, C102.]

Miscellaneous

I have to commend the translators for translating a quotation from the Aeneid on pp. 261–3 as real verse, with metre and all, and not as prose as is usually done in the ITRL. I tried to google a few phrases from their translation of this passage but got no hits, so I guess the translation is their own, made especially for this volume.

On the other hand, their use of “taboo” on p. 383 feels anachronistic; you can't help being reminded of the fact that the term and the concept come from Polynesian cultures, with which Europeans would not have had contact for quite some time after Poggio's day.

I also raised an eyebrow at “mining bronze” on p. 365. Surely you can't mine bronze, since it's an alloy of copper and tin? Isn't it more likely that the Latin word aes, which can mean both ‘bronze’ and ‘copper’, is intended in the latter sense here?

And on p. 291, we have “as bluebottles fly toward honey”; since this English word was new to me, I peeked at the Latin on the facing page and found that there they are muscae, i.e. simply “flies” and not specifically bluebottles, which are just a subset of flies.

An interesting anecdote that I didn't previously know about: “Plato, after being summoned by Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily because of the glory of his learning, was sold into slavery upon the tyrant's orders.” (On the Unhappiness of Leaders, C62.) Well, that escalated quickly! I wonder how he got out of this terrible predicament.

I have never given this any thought before, but the words serve and preserve are obviously related, but it isn't so obvious why two such related words should have such unrelated meanings. Apparently the ‘preserve’ sense came first: “slaves [servi] are named from the fact that commanders are wont to sell, and thus save [servare], slaves, and not to kill them” (p. 497, n. 109).

Interesting: Poggio, while attending the Council of Constance, spent some time travelling in Germany looking for manuscripts of otherwise lost ancient literary works, and made several important discoveries (p. 510, n. 20).