Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 28

We have explained how the virtuous republic benefits its founders, but what about their successors and subjects? What good did the Romans derive from their good orders? For Livy, human beings flourish through virtue, and virtue thrives best in a free state; at its highest points, the Republic combines both glory and warrior discipline with civic justice, reverence for the mos maiorum and concord (see Chapter 11). In these ways, Livy’s historiography comes into close ethical contact with classical philosophical traditions of ‘human flourishing’ and the ‘political art’ more generally.

Livy emphasises these themes throughout his work, but nowhere more clearly than in his admiring account of Rome during the Second Punic War. Late in that war, the traditional Roman virtues reached their peak:

People nowadays may laugh at the admirers of antiquity. I for my part do not believe it possible, even if there ever existed a commonwealth of wise men such as philosophers dream of but have never really known, that there could be an aristocracy more grave or more temperate in their desire for power [cupidine imperii] or a people with purer manners and a higher moral tone [than the Romans]. That a century of juniors should have been anxious to consult their seniors as to whom they were to place in supreme authority is a thing hardly credible in these days, when we see in what contempt children hold the authority of their parents. (Liv. 26.22; cf. Polyb. 6.47–54; Levene 2010: 313–315)

In practice, at least, Livy’s nobles are by no means always moderate and grave, nor are his people always pure and moral; but for all the traditional ‘admirers of antiquity’ to whom Livy is referring, this passage captures the essence of Roman moderation and respect for authority within the virtuous republic. According to Livy, at least, the Roman Republic was truly a republic of virtue up until the Second Punic War because it wisely combined reverence, obedience, moderation and pure mores, all of which were manifested symbolically in the respect of the young for the old. Even if the Romans did not embody their own virtuous ideals completely, they achieved those ideals better than any other people, and their citizens therefore lived the most admirable of human lives. The Roman Republic was the truest aristocracy possible in this world: it cultivated and exhibited the traditional virtues at a higher level and for a longer period than any other commonwealth.

While Livy sets his highest praise of Rome against the utopias of the ancient philosophers, Machiavelli offers his exaltation of the best republic as an alternative to the Christian promise of a heavenly paradise, an idea with neo-Platonic and Stoic roots, but one that was most fully developed in St Augustine’s City of God. Even more than the pagan utopias, Machiavelli teaches, the Christian promise of eternal life has disarmed the earthly world; it has destroyed virtue; it has denigrated the admirable desire for worldly honour, unnaturally subjected humanity to Fortuna, suffused the world with idleness, and weakened men by teaching ‘humility, abjectness, and contempt of things human’ (D 2.2.2). In contrast, Machiavelli’s well-ordered Republic, based on his distinctive understanding of Rome’s greatness, is the most complete ‘paradise’ possible in this world:

For larger peoples are seen there, because marriages are freer and more desirable to men since each willingly procreates those children he believes he can nourish. He does not fear that his patrimony will be taken away, and he knows not only that they are born free and not slaves, but that they can through their virtue become princes. Riches are seen to multiply there in larger number, both those that come from agriculture and those that come from the arts. For each willingly multiplies that thing and seeks to acquire those goods he believes he can enjoy once acquired. From which it arises that men in rivalry think of private and public advantages, and both the one and the other come to grow marvellously.(D 2.2.3)⁶

In this passage Machiavelli comes close to the ideal republican polities of modern neo-republicans, albeit without their emphasis on the liberal ideals of individual freedom and rights. Machiavelli has liberated human ambition from its traditional limits and venerated earthly prosperity as the cardinal achievement of the successful republic.

While Livy praises the Romans for staving off luxury and wealth longer than any other people, Machiavelli praises their expansionism and successful acquisitiveness. While Livy praises the Romans for moderating their desires, Machiavelli praises them for avoiding the middle path and suggests that in the well-ordered republic every citizen can comfortably pursue his desires (D 3.21). While Livy praises the Republic for cultivating young men who love and respect their fathers, Machiavelli writes that ‘men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony’ and praises the Republic for securing the latter particularly well (P 17).⁷ For Machiavelli, the virtuous republic is the most effective political framework for holding the dynamic, even contentious, relations of the many and the few in equilibrium, ensuring wealth for the one, and princely power and glory for the other (McCormick 2011: 59). Governments that aim for the salvation of their citizens or a supra-political virtue, as well as those that fail to internalise the virtù of radical self-reliance, are poorly ordered and ultimately self-defeating. For these reasons, the Machiavellian ‘virtues’ are not ends but efficient means, a characterisation that Livy and other classical historians would have disdainfully rejected. While virtue makes possible the best human polity (with its armed citizenry, ambitious elite and limited but kingly offices), it is not a good in itself. Instead, in Machiavelli’s vision, the virtuous republic is acquisitive and imperialistic; its end is imperium sine fine; its citizens find their happiness not in eudaimonia, but rather, to adapt Hobbes’s phrase, in a restless search for power after power, that enables them to satisfy their desires continually.