When Machiavelli and his contemporaries felt impelled — as in 1512 — to reflect on the immense power of Fortune in human affairs, they generally turned to the Roman historians and moralists to supply them with an authoritative analysis of the goddess’s character. These writers had laid it down that, if a ruler owes his position to the intervention of Fortune, the first lesson he must learn is to fear the goddess, even when she comes bearing gifts. Livy had furnished a particularly influential statement of this claim in Book XXX of his History, in the course of describing the dramatic moment when Hannibal finally capitulates to the young Scipio. Hannibal begins his speech of surrender by remarking admiringly that his conqueror has so far been ‘a man whom Fortune has never deceived’. But this merely prompts him to issue a grave warning about the place of Fortune in human affairs. Not only is ‘the might of Fortune immense’, but ‘the greatest good Fortune is always least to be trusted’. If we depend on Fortune to raise us up, we are liable to fall ‘the more terribly’ when she turns against us, as she is almost certain to do in the end (XXX.30.12–23).
However, the Roman moralists never thought of Fortune as an inexorably malign force. On the contrary, they saw her as a good goddess, bona dea, and a potential ally whose attention it is well worth trying to attract. The reason for seeking her friendship is of course that she disposes of the goods of Fortune, which all men are assumed to desire. These goods themselves are variously described: Seneca emphasizes honours and riches; Sallust prefers to single out glory and power. But it was generally agreed that, of all the gifts of Fortune, the greatest is honour and the glory that comes with it. As Cicero repeatedly stresses in De Officiis, man’s highest good is ‘the attainment of glory’, ‘the enhancement of personal honour and glory’, the acquisition of the ‘truest glory’ that can be won (II.9.31; II.12.42; II.14.48.).
How, then, can we persuade Fortune to look in our direction, to pour out the gifts from her cornucopia on us rather than on others? The answer is that, although Fortune is a goddess, she is still a woman; and since she is a woman, she is most of all attracted by the vir, the man of true manliness. One quality she especially likes to reward is thus held to be manly courage. Livy, for example, several times cites the adage that ‘Fortune favours the brave.’ But the quality she admires most of all is virtus, the eponymous attribute of the truly manly man. The idea underlying this belief is most clearly set out in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, in which he lays it down that the criterion for being a real man, a vir, is the possession of virtus in the highest degree. The implications of the argument are extensively explored in Livy’s History, in which the successes won by the Romans are almost always explained in terms of the fact that Fortune likes to follow and even wait upon virtus, and generally smiles on those who exhibit it.
With the triumph of Christianity, this classical analysis of Fortune was entirely overthrown. The Christian view, most compellingly stated by Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, is based on denying the key assumption that Fortune is open to being influenced. The goddess is now depicted as ‘a blind power’, and hence as completely careless and indiscriminate in the bestowal of her gifts. She is no longer seen as a potential friend, but simply as a pitiless force; her symbol is no longer the cornucopia, but rather the wheel of change which turns inexorably ‘like the ebb and flow of the tide’ (177–9).
This new view of Fortune’s nature went with a new sense of her significance. By her very carelessness and lack of concern for human merit in the disposition of her rewards, she is said to remind us that the goods of Fortune are completely unworthy of our pursuit, that the desire for worldly honour and glory is, as Boethius puts it, ‘really nothing at all’ (221). She serves in consequence to direct our footsteps away from the paths of glory, encouraging us to look beyond our earthly prison in order to seek our heavenly home. But this means that, in spite of her capricious tyranny, Fortune is genuinely an ancilla dei, an agent of God’s benevolent providence. For it is part of God’s design to show us that ‘happiness cannot consist in the fortuitous things of this mortal life’, and thus to make us ‘despise all earthly affairs, and in the joy of heaven rejoice to be freed from earthly things’ (197, 221). It is for this reason, Boethius concludes, that God has placed the control of the world’s goods in Fortune’s feckless hands. His aim is to teach us ‘that sufficiency cannot be obtained through wealth, nor power through kingship, nor respect through office, nor fame through glory’ (263).
Boethius’s reconciliation of Fortune with providence had an enduring influence on Italian literature: it underlies Dante’s discussion of Fortune in canto VII of The Inferno and furnishes the theme of Petrarch’s Remedy of the Two Kinds of Fortune. However, with the recovery of classical values in the Renaissance, this analysis of Fortune as an ancilla dei was in turn challenged by a return to the earlier suggestion that a distinction must be drawn between Fortune and fate.
This development originated in a changing view about the nature of man’s peculiar ‘excellence and dignity’. Traditionally this had been held to lie in his possession of an immortal soul, but in the work of Petrarch’s successors we find a growing tendency to shift the emphasis in such a way as to highlight the freedom of the will. Man’s freedom was felt to be threatened, however, by the concept of Fortune as an inexorable force. So we find a corresponding tendency to repudiate any suggestion that Fortune is merely an agent of providence. A striking example is provided by Pico della Mirandola’s attack on the alleged science of astrology, a science he denounces for embodying the false assumption that our Fortunes are ineluctably assigned to us by the stars at the moment of our birth. A little later, we begin to encounter a widespread appeal to the far more optimistic view that — as Shakespeare makes Cassius say to Brutus — if we fail in our efforts to attain greatness, the fault must lie ‘not in our stars but in our selves’.
By building on this new attitude to freedom, the humanists of fifteenth-century Italy were able to reconstruct the full classical image of Fortune’s role in human affairs. We find it in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia, in Giovanni Pontano’s treatise On Fortune, and most remarkably in Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s tract of 1444 entitled A Dream of Fortune. The writer dreams that he is being guided through Fortune’s kingdom, and that he encounters the goddess herself, who agrees to answer his questions. She admits to being wilful in the exercise of her powers, for when he inquires, ‘How long do you remain kindly to men?’ she replies, ‘To none for very long.’ But she is far from heedless of human merit, and does not deny the suggestion that ‘there are arts by which it is possible for your favour to be gained’. Finally, when she is asked what qualities she particularly likes and dislikes, she responds with an allusion to the idea that Fortune favours the brave, declaring that ‘those who lack courage are more hateful than anyone else’.[2]
When Machiavelli comes to discuss ‘Fortune’s power in human affairs’ in the penultimate chapter of The Prince, his handling of this crucial theme reveals him to be a typical representative of humanist attitudes. He opens his chapter by invoking the familiar belief that men are ‘ruled by Fortune and by God’, and by noting the apparent implication that ‘we have no remedy at all’ against the world’s variations, since everything is providentially foreordained (84). In contrast to these Christian assumptions, he immediately offers a classical analysis of liberty. He concedes, of course, that human freedom is far from complete, since Fortune is immensely powerful, and ‘may be the arbiter of half our actions’. But he insists that to suppose our fate to be entirely in her hands would be ‘to eliminate human freedom’. And since he holds firmly to the humanist view that ‘God does not want to do everything, in order not to deprive us of our freedom and the glory that belongs to us’, he concludes that roughly half our actions must be genuinely under our control rather than under Fortune’s sway (84–5, 89).