It is evident, however, that the most intensive debates at the Orti were on political themes. As one of the participants, Antonio Brucioli, later recalled in his Dialogues, they continually discussed the fate of republican regimes: how they rise to greatness, how they sustain their liberties, how they decline and fall into corruption, how they finally arrive at their inescapable point of collapse. Nor did their interest in civic freedom express itself merely in words. Some members of the group became such passionate opponents of the restored Medicean ‘tyranny’ that they were drawn into the unsuccessful plot to murder Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in 1522. One of those executed after the conspiracy misfired was Jacopo da Diacceto; among those condemned to exile were Zanobi Buondelmonti, Luigi Alamanni, and Brucioli himself. All had been prominent members of the Orti Oricellari circle, the meetings of which came to an abrupt end after the failure of the attempted coup.
Machiavelli was never so vehement a partisan of republican liberty that he felt inclined to associate himself with any of the various anti-Medicean conspiracies. But it is clear that he was deeply influenced by his contacts with Cosimo Rucellai and his friends. One outcome of his participation in their discussions was his treatise on The Art of War, which he published in 1521. This is actually couched in the form of a conversation set in the Orti Oricellari, with Rucellai introducing the argument while Buondelmonti and Alamanni serve as the chief interlocutors. But the most important product of Machiavelli’s association with these republican sympathisers was his decision to write his Discourses, his longest and in some ways his most original contribution to the theory of government. Not only was the work dedicated to Buondelmonti and Rucellai, but Machiavelli explicitly credits them in his Dedication with having ‘forced me to write what I of myself never would have written’ (188).
Machiavelli’s Discourses nominally takes the form of a commentary on the first ten books of Livy’s history of Rome, in the course of which Livy had traced the rise of the city to greatness after the defeat of her local rivals, the expulsion of her kings and the establishment of the ‘free state’. But Machiavelli ranges far more widely through Livy’s text than his title suggests, and handles his chosen topics in a discursive, unsystematic and occasionally even fragmentary way. Sometimes he uses Livy’s narrative as a peg on which to hang a wide-ranging discussion of some major topic in the theory of statecraft, but at other times he merely talks about an individual figure or tells a story and draws a moral from it. This is by no means to say that his labyrinth lacks a guiding thread. Of the three Books into which the Discourses are divided, the first is primarily concerned with the constitution of a free state, the second with how to maintain effective military power and the third with questions of leadership. While I shall follow these contours, however, it needs to be remembered that the effect of doing so will be to give the impression of a more neatly organized text than Machiavelli succeeded in creating or perhaps even wanted to create.
As Machiavelli sets out to investigate the early history of Rome, there is one question that preoccupies him above all. He first mentions it in the opening paragraph of the first Discourse, and it underlies much of the rest of the book. His aim, he says, is to discover what ‘made possible the dominant position to which that republic rose’ (192). What enabled Rome to attain its unparalleled greatness and power?
There are obvious links between this theme and that of The Prince. It is true that in The Prince Machiavelli begins by excluding republics from consideration, whereas in the Discourses they furnish him with his main evidence. But it would be a mistake to infer that the Discourses are exclusively concerned with republics as opposed to principalities. As Machiavelli stresses in chapter 2, his interest lies not in republics as such, but rather in the government of cities, whether they are ruled ‘as republics or as princedoms’ (195). Moreover, there are close parallels between Machiavelli’s desire in The Prince to advise rulers on how to attain glory by doing ‘great things’ and his aspiration in the Discourses to explain why certain cities have ‘come to greatness’, and why the city of Rome in particular managed to attain ‘supreme greatness’ and to produce such ‘great results’ (207–11, 341).
What, then, were ‘the methods needed for attaining to greatness’ in the case of Rome (358)? For Machiavelli the question is a practical one, since he endorses the conventional humanist assumption that anyone who ‘considers present affairs and ancient ones readily understands that all cities and all peoples have the same desires and the same traits’. This means that ‘he who diligently examines past events easily foresees future ones’ and ‘can apply to them the remedies used by the ancients’, or at least ‘devise new ones because of the similarity of the events’ (278). The exhilarating hope that underlies and animates the Discourses is thus that, if we can find out the cause of Rome’s success, we may be able to repeat it.
A study of classical history discloses, according to the start of the second Discourse, that the clue to understanding Rome’s achievement can be encapsulated in a single sentence. ‘Experience shows that cities have never increased in dominion or riches except while they have been at liberty.’ The ancient world is said to offer two particularly impressive illustrations of this general truth. First, ‘it is a marvellous thing to consider to what greatness Athens came in the space of a hundred years after she freed herself from the tyranny of Pisistratus’. But above all it is ‘very marvellous to observe what greatness Rome came to after she freed herself from her kings’ (329). By contrast, ‘the opposite of all these things happens in those countries that live as slaves’ (333). For ‘as soon as a tyranny is established over a free community’, the first evil that results is that such cities ‘no longer go forward and no longer increase in power or in riches; but in most instances, in fact always, they go backward’ (329).
What Machiavelli primarily has in mind in laying so much emphasis on liberty is that a city bent on greatness must remain free from all forms of political servitude, whether imposed ‘internally’ by the rule of a tyrant or ‘externally’ by an imperial power (195, 235). This in turn means that to say of a city that it possesses its liberty is equivalent to saying that it holds itself independent of any authority save that of the community itself. To speak of a ‘free state’ is thus to speak of a state that governs itself. Machiavelli makes this clear in the second chapter of his first Discourse, where he announces that he will ‘omit discussion of those cities’ that started by being ‘subject to somebody’ and will concentrate on those which began in liberty — that is, on those which ‘at once governed themselves by their own judgement’ (195). The same commitment is reiterated later in the chapter, where Machiavelli first praises the laws of Solon for setting up ‘a form of government based on the people’, and then proceeds to equate this arrangement with that of living ‘in liberty’ (199).