Machiavellian Foundlings: Castruccio Castracani and the Aphorism

Abstract

Life is short, art is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgment is difficult.Aphorism I, HippocratesIn book one, chapter two of his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio Machiavelli's rehearsal of the commonplace that every city must undergo a natural cycle of political permutations is interrupted by the specter of inexorable decline: “This is the cycle [cerchio] within which all states that have governed themselves and now govern themselves revolve; but only rarely do they revert to the same form of government because almost no state can repeatedly undergo these mutations and remain afoot.” The circle—figure of sameness, continuity, and conservation in Plato's ontology and Aristotle's politics—will nearly always be broken and spun out into a descending line—figure of difference, discontinuity, and loss. And this near certainty, as is revealed by the anthropomorphism of the closing metaphor (“rimanere in piede“), is in turn rooted in the deeper human reality of death and intergenerational flux.