Machiavelli and the Gracchi
Prudence, Violence and Redistribution
John P. McCormick
University of Chicago
jpmccorm@uchicago.edu
This essay explores curious ambiguities in Machiavelli’s account of the Brothers
Gracchus, Roman tribunes who attempted to legislate the redistribution of public lands from the
nobility to the plebeians.
In the Discourses, Machiavelli seems to concur with the conventional
republican narrative, perhaps first and best articulated by Cicero, that blames the brothers for
undermining (and then causing the downfall of) the Roman Republic—even though they, in fact, had
been forcibly crushed by the republic’s senatorial order.
However, I argue that, if one takes
into consideration the significance of the Ciompi Revolt—a socio-economic revolution that
gripped Florence in the fourteenth century—for Machiavelli’s aristocratic Florentine audience,
one can detect in Machiavelli’s analysis a rhetorical strategy through which: (1) Machiavelli
actually endorses the Gracchan agenda; and (2) subtly intimates the more violent means that
similarly intentioned reformers must employ to succeed where the Gracchi had failed.
Machiavelli
invokes “prudence” in his passages devoted to the Gracchi; I accentuate the form of prudential
rhetoric that he practices in such passages, and point to the prudential form of violence he
thought necessary if republics were to, in his words, “keep the public rich, and the citizens
poor.”
*
*
*
1
2
Machiavelli demonstrates in the Discourses and The Prince how usurpers like Agathocles
the Sicilian and Clearchus of Heraclea successfully practiced the “way of tyranny” against the
senatorial orders of their republics: they hacked to pieces the senators and the richest citizens
1. Machiavelli, Discorsi, composed circa 1513-19, C. Vivanti, ed.
(Turin, 1997); hereafter cited in the main text with book and chapter numbers
in parentheses. I rely on the following translations, often emended:
Discourses on Livy, trans. H. C. Mansfield, Jr., and N. Tarcov (Chicago,
1997) and The Sweetness of Power, trans. J. B. Atkinson and D. Sices (Dekalb,
Il, 2002).
2. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe (De Principatipus), composed circa
1513 and published in 1532, ed. G. Inglese (Turin, 1995), abbreviated as “P,”
cited with chapter numbers within the text. Consult the English translations
of The Prince by H. C. Mansfield, Jr., (Chicago, 1998), and W. J. Connell
(Boston, 2005).
2
(P 8; I.16).
In short—with the acquiescence of the Syracusan people and the approval of the
Heracleans—Agathocles and Clearchus rendered the grandi, the great, the big, piccoli.
about the way of freedom?
But what
What recourse is available to republican magistrates who do not
necessarily want to become princes cum tyrants?
What options are available to an individual who
wishes to preserve or reform a republic but faces intransigent senatorial opposition?
This short
essay pursues Machiavelli’s less than obvious answer to these questions.
The Roman Senate’s triumphs over Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus are notable episodes of
violent, class conflict within republics, instances where the nobility, at least in the short
term, rather than their adversary, prevails.
As tribunes of the plebs, the Gracchi championed,
against fierce opposition from the grandi, redistributive agrarian legislation on behalf of the
plebeians.
On separate occasions, members of the Senate and/or their clients eliminated the
brothers in dramatically public fashions.
Machiavelli speaks very briefly about the Gracchi and,
notably, offers no aesthetically striking details of their demise, as he does so often in cases
like those mentioned above where senators are successfully subdued by the likes of Agathocles and
3
Clearchus.
He does, however, emphasize the decisive impact that the brothers’ ill-fated reform
efforts made on the history of the Roman Republic.
Ultimately, the Brothers Gracchus serve as
Machiavelli’s exemplars of how not to confront the senate, either as potential princes or
republican reformers.
But what might others learn from the Gracchi’s mistakes?
Machiavelli famously defies consensus among commentators on the Roman Republic by
attributing the flourishing of Rome’s freedom and
greatness to the tumults resulting from the conflict
between the grandi and the popolo.
But he also concedes that tumults
ultimately contributed to the ruin of Rome’s free way of life after “the time” of the Gracchi and
the latter’s revival of the Agrarian Laws (I.4).
The
Agrarian Laws, sponsored by Tiberius and
Gaius, limited the amount of public lands citizens could hold, and redistributed to the plebs
public lands already held in custody by wealthy Romans.
Senators and their clients murdered
Tiberius in the Roman Forum after he successfully resisted their efforts to block passage of the
laws.
A decade later, they desecrated the body of his brother, Gaius, who had committed suicide
3. On the role of spectacle or aesthetics more generally in
Machiavelli, see Melissa M. Matthes, The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of
Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau (Penn State, 2001);
Diego A. von Vacano, The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making
of Aesthetic Political Theory (Lanham, MD, 2007); and Davide Panagia, The
Political Life of Sensation (Durham, 2009).
3
after failing to prevent a conservative rollback of his brother’s and his own agrarian and
judicial reforms.
Apparently taking these lessons to heart, all future “reformers” would enter
the Forum accompanied by armed legions.
It is worth noting that Machiavelli’s description of Rome’s descent into corruption after
these events invokes the “time of” the Gracchi, or the “scandals” and “contentions” that arose in
response to their policies (I.37, III.24).
Machiavelli attributes that corruption and decline to
neither the brothers themselves nor to the content of their land reform proposals.
Indeed, as we
will see, he concludes his description by criticizing the brothers’ prudence rather than their
intentions, and by validating the necessity of laws like those they proposed and promulgated
(I.37).
But why does Machiavelli take this confusingly circuitous route to such conclusions?
4
I
suggest that for Machiavelli’s wealthy patrician audience, typified by the Discourses’
5
dedicatees, redistribution is a delicate issue indeed.
Hence, it is crucial that we examine
Machiavelli’s deeply ambiguous account of the brothers’ reform agenda with great care.
Machiavelli’s discussion of the Gracchi’s careers initially appears to condemn both the
brothers and the Roman plebs (I.37).
Apparently agreeing with the position of aristocratic
critics of the plebeians whom Machiavelli himself attempted to refute during a debate that he
staged earlier in the Discourses (I.5), here he reiterates the assertions of his erstwhile
opponents:
“It was not enough for the Roman plebs to secure itself against the nobles by the
creation of the tribunes, to which desire it was constrained by necessity; for having obtained
that, it began at once to engage in combat through ambition, and to wish to share honors and
materials with the nobility as the thing esteemed most by men” (I.37).
One might plausibly read this statement to mean that (a) the plebeians were
justified in desiring the tribunate because necessity dictated a magistracy that would
protect them from domination exercised by the nobles; but that (b) Machiavelli
condemns the plebeians for aspiring after offices and wealth because they were
motivated by ambition and greed when they did so.
Yet in the bulk of the chapter, and
elsewhere (e.g., III.24), Machiavelli presents details of the circumstances in which
offices and wealth also proved to be necessary means by which the plebs might protect
4. On the ambiguity of Machiavelli’s pronouncements on Roman agrarian
reform, see Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought
(Cambridge, 2004) 75-86.
5. On the necessity of reading the Discourses through the eyes of its
young aristocratic dedicatees, Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti, see
John P. McCormick, “Tempering the Grandi’s Appetite to Oppress: The
Dedication and Intention of Machiavelli’s Discourses,” in Victoria Kahn, et.
al., eds., Politics and the Passions, 1500-1789 (Princeton, 2006) 7-29.
4
its liberty and that of the republic:
circumstances of gross economic inequality
between the grandi and the popolo.
In a Florentine political culture still deeply scarred by the violent, bloody
and destructive Ciompi Revolt (1378) and its aftermath, Machiavelli treats the
political ramifications of economic inequality quite gingerly.
To be sure, the Ciompi
were defeated and the widely participatory republic that emerged after the Revolt was
ultimately undermined by aristocratic subversion.
6
Nevertheless, the purported
excesses of the Ciompians’ behavior and demands would play an important role in
Florentine humanism’s efforts to legitimate both the Albizzi oligarchy and the Medici
principality that subsequently ruled the city.
7
Indeed, in Rome the supposed
extremism of the Gracchi’s actions and agenda had played much the same role in
legitimating conservative agendas both radical, in the case of Sulla, and more
moderate, as espoused by Cicero.
8
Therefore, Machiavelli’s immediate audience of humanist ottimati might easily
associate Machiavelli’s account of plebeian demands for the consulship and for
agrarian legislation in Rome with the political and economic demands of lower
guildsmen and unguilded workers during the Ciompian insurrection a century and a half
earlier.
The woolworkers had demanded debt relief, the right to organize themselves
as a guild and guaranteed seats in the Signoria, the republic’s executive committee.
This may account for the fact that, in the Discourses, Machiavelli writes in such a
way that many interpreters consider the Agrarian Laws themselves (and the accompanying
political reforms restoring judicial authority, usurped by Rome’s senatorial class, to
less exalted citizens) as the cause of Rome’s destruction.
Upon closer inspection,
however, Machiavelli argues that the cause of the republic’s corruption and collapse
6. See Gene Brucker. “The Ciompi Revolt,” in Nicolai Rubinstein, ed.
Florentine Studies (London, 1968); and John Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus
in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).
7. See James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge,
2000) 75-178.
8. Nelson establishes Cicero as the paradigmatic “Roman” (as opposed
to “Greek”) republican on the basis of his criticisms of both the Agrarian
Laws and the Gracchi. See Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought,
57-59.
5
was not the Agrarian Laws but rather the deeply and increasingly inequitable
circumstances to which the laws were merely an inevitable and even necessary response.
Along these lines, Machiavelli’s famous account of the Ciompi Revolt in the
Florentine Histories exhibits a similar ambivalence.
On the one hand, Machiavelli’s
describes socio-economic circumstances that seem to justify the indignation expressed
by the lower classes; on the other, Machiavelli engages in uncharacteristically
gratuitous moral denunciations of the Ciompi and the Florentine plebe, and resorts to
seemingly strained outrage over their demands and behavior.
Ultimately, however, when
Machiavelli gives voice, through the notorious speech of an unnamed Ciompian, to the
aspirations and objectives of the rebels, the speaker, more than any other figure in
the work, expresses social and political views tightly consonant with Machiavelli’s
9
own.
These ambiguities should be kept in mind when, in the Discourses, Machiavelli
remarks, “well-ordered republics must keep the public rich and citizens poor,” and
furthermore, referring to Roman agrarian legislation, that “there must have been in
the city of Rome a defect in this law” (I.37).
The former statement signals
Machiavelli’s preference for socio-economic conditions more egalitarian than those
that obtained in his paradigmatic republic, Rome.
curious.
The latter statement is no less
After all, the Agrarian Laws, revived by the Gracchi, did not themselves
fail to make the public rich and the citizens poor.
On the contrary, according to
Machiavelli, their “defect” actually seems to correspond with the time, the moment,
when they were proposed or promulgated: “Either [the legislation] was not enacted at
the beginning so that it did not have to be addressed again every day; or they delayed
so much in making it because looking back might be scandalous” (I.37).
In other
words, agrarian legislation, although demanded by the plebeians early on in both
Livy’s and Machiavelli’s accounts, was neither instituted at the start of the republic
nor, as a result, successfully preserved at some later point.
The fatal flaw therefore resides not in the laws themselves but in the fact
that they were not instituted until such point as it was too late for them to be
passed without violent opposition or too late to be fully efficacious upon enactment.
9. See Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. L. Banfield and H.C.
Mansfield (Princeton, 1990), III.12-22, pp. 121-136.
6
What, to Machiavelli’s mind, accounts for the fact that the laws were promulgated only
very late, or, rather, who prevented the laws from being passed even though they were
discussed and proposed very early in the republic’s history?
According to Machiavelli, the nobility, “the greater part” of which was, in
fact, the wealthiest Roman citizens, apparently refused to recognize that the public
good necessitated a minimizing of economic inequality within the republic (I.37).
Rather, the nobility associated the common good with their own economic privilege: as
Machiavelli observes, “it appeared to them that they were defending the public in
opposing” agrarian legislation.
Moreover, Machiavelli declares that the nobles were
angered at the prospect of losing new revenue sources since the agrarian reforms
mandated that subsequently conquered lands would be distributed among the plebs,
rather than be entrusted to the custodial care of senators and their clients.
Thus,
according to Machiavelli, the prospect of agrarian legislation led the Senate to send
Roman armies “to the farthest parts of Italy or outside of Italy” so that they might
acquire lands that poor plebeians could not feasibly make profitable even if they were
to own them.
This senatorial strategy, as described by Machiavelli, worked in the following
way:
“the fields possessed by the enemies of Rome, being distant from the eyes of the
plebs and in places where it was not easy for them to cultivate, came to be less
desired by them” (I.37).
These distant lands would, however, become an unlimited
source of revenue for the few wealthiest Romans who could afford to maintain them—a
source of revenue that would inevitably exacerbate the inequality that already existed
at home between the nobles and the plebeians.
In fact, as Livy reports in greater
detail, while plebeian soldiers were in the field, senators and their clients
foreclosed on their lands at home; consequently the soldiers could no longer pay their
debts since they lacked yields from the farms they’d left uncultivated while marching
off to war.
The senatorial class then worked these lands with the cheap labor of
slaves such that increasingly impoverished and unemployed citizen-soldiers stopped
7
having children who could repopulate the army.
10
This was precisely the socio-economic
cum military crisis that the Gracchi tried to address.
Through such self-enriching policies, the nobles aggravated the republic’s
socio-political problems, not only by perpetuating conditions of economic inequality,
but also by making military commanders inordinately powerful (III.24).
According to
Machiavelli, senatorially driven acquisition of territory farther and farther a field
from Rome and Italy necessitated the prolongation of military commands.
This in turn
laid the groundwork for Caesarism: fewer captains received military experience, hence
necessitating reliance on a smaller and smaller cadre of commanders; furthermore, the
increasingly proletarianized citizen-soldiers became economically dependent on the
generals with whom they lived for years at a time away from the city.
Machiavelli
concedes that the plebeians initiated the practice of prolonging terms of office: they
re-elected tribunes who most effectively defended them against the oppressive behavior
of the nobility and who most deftly resisted the obstructionist efforts of the latter
against pro-plebeian reforms.
But he argues that the Senate converted repeated
reappointment into the practice that eventually undermined the republic’s “free way of
life”: the
Senate encouraged the creation of pro-consuls
who
required more than the usual annual term of office to conquer and maintain the distant
lands that were the source of the nobility’s steady streams of revenue.
In the end, Machiavelli suggests, the controversies surrounding Agrarian
legislation “altogether ruined Roman freedom” because the nobles’ wealth and power had
increased to the point where they could only be overcome with force (I.37).
As a
result, both the Senate and the plebs began supporting armed champions, who now
possessed unprecedented military authority, like Sulla and Pompey, on the one hand,
and Marius and Caesar, on the other; that is, oligarchically or popularly inclined
warlords who commanded armies more loyal to their commanders than to the republic.
11
Many interpreters, especially those inspired by the work of Leo Strauss,
often
suggest that Machiavelli understood the Roman nobility to be driven primarily by a
10. See Livy, History of Rome, Books 1-10 (vols. I-IV), trans. B.O.
Foster (Loeb, 1919-26), e.g., IV.49, 51, VI.5, 35; cf. also, Plutarch’s Lives
(Cambridge, 1921) X.145-241.
8
desire for glory or honor rather than by the more base appetite for acquiring and
preserving wealth.
Yet Machiavelli declares quite explicitly in the chapter on the
Agrarian Laws that, in the Roman context, the grandi, after protracted delays, “always
yielded honors to the plebs without extraordinary scandals,” but that they defended
“property” with the utmost “obstinance” (I.37).
This “obstinance” is an explicit but
understated reference to the butchery that the senators inflicted upon the Gracchi and
their supporters.
Machiavelli suggests that this fact demonstrates “how
more men esteem property than honors,”
much
and, as it often does, “men”
here refers euphemistically to members of the nobility (see, e.g.,
D I.3).
Clearly,
Machiavelli understands the nobles to value material
goods much more highly than they do their reputation
and prestige, their honor and their dignity.
On this basis,
economic inequality should not be dismissed or minimized, as Straussians and
others often do, as a
key factor in Machiavelli’s analysis of domestic
politics.12
In a similar vein, commentators with
tend to read
poststructuralist inclinations
Machiavelli as a critic of the Agrarian Laws, as an
opponent of redistributive politics,
a thinker who denounced the
deleterious “ennobling” of the plebeians signified by popular demands for
13
redistribution.
11.
169, 250.
However, by the end of chapter 37, Machiavelli is much less
See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL, 1958), 134,
12. See de Grazia’s discussion of Machiavelli’s reflections on his own
poverty and its role in his unsuccessful political career and personal
misfortunes: see Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, 1989),
358.
13. A formidable proponent of this view is Miguel E. Vatter, Between
Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (London, 2000) 197,
229, 231, no. 30.
9
ambiguous about whether the plebs, the Gracchi and the Agrarian Laws, individually or
in combination, caused the demise of the republic; on the contrary, he places the
so enormous is the ambition
blame squarely with the nobles: “
of the great that it soon brings that city to
ruin if it is not beaten down in a city by
various ways and various modes” (I.37,
In other words,
emphasis added).
the nobles’ ambition is more damaging to a republic
than that of the plebs, and the latter need more than one means, such as the
tribunate, to hold back the insolence of the great.
“If the contention over the
Agrarian laws took three hundred years to make Rome servile,” Machiavelli observes,
“it
would perhaps have been led into servitude much sooner
if the plebs had not always checked the ambition of the
nobles, both with this law and with its other appetites”
(I.37).
That is, in addition to the tribunate,
the plebs were correct in
seeking to reduce the nobility’s material advantages through the
Agrarian Laws, and in exhibiting an appetite to share in honors such as the
consulship (see I.60).
As the quote above suggests, Machiavelli understands the
obstinacy of the grandi to be responsible for the “scandals” that eventually destroy
Rome; the scandals were not in truth generated by the Agrarian Laws promulgated by the
Gracchi, which, by that time, are largely a response to oligarchic intransigence.
Machiavelli insists that
the grandi would have ruined the republic much
earlier had they not been constrained by both laws precisely
like the Agrarian Laws, and the plebeian appetite not to be
dominated that called for such laws (I.37).
1
0
After all, the ambition of the grandi and the avarice of the Senate, in
Machiavelli’s estimation, made possible the brothers’ popular appeal and set in motion
the republic’s decline.
Recall that Machiavelli declares unequivocally: “well-ordered
republics must keep the public rich and citizens poor” (I.37).
taken up with demonstrating how
Much of the chapter is
the nobility intensified inequitable
conditions in Rome, and with describing how steadfastly they refused to ameliorate
these conditions by sharing the republic’s wealth with the people—wealth, it might be
added, that the people themselves had earned through the sweat and blood of combat.
Moreover, as we begin to return to some of the questions raised at the outset
of this essay, what exactly does Machiavelli mean when he expresses sympathy with the
brothers’ “intentions, if not their prudence” (I.37)?
He may reproach their methods
in ways I’ll explore presently, but he clearly does not besmirch the Gracchan cause.
Machiavelli does not denounce the Gracchi for pursuing redistributive policies, as
such; again, he seems only to
criticize them for their timing in reviving
the laws that enacted those policies. Machiavelli remarks: “To try to take
away a disorder that has grown in a republic, and because of this,
to make a law
that looks very far back, is an ill-considered policy.”
This
elusive statement seems to imply that retroactive law is especially obnoxious to those
it targets; one can’t expect to take property away from those who have managed and
benefited from it for some time without provoking them into uncivil behavior.
Yet
Machiavelli reports that the nobles were just as enraged by the law’s prohibition on
their means of gaining more wealth in the future, as by the law’s redistributive
impact on wealth that the senatorial order already controlled.
Perhaps Machiavelli has something else entirely in mind here:
rather than
reviving what Machiavelli describes as a very old law,
Machiavelli intimates that the Gracchi ought to have instituted
a new law.
That is, like lawgivers or founders, in order to make the public rich
and the citizens poor,
they should have created their own law—one that
1
1
bore their own names.
In this case,
the Gracchi, in all likelihood,
would have been compelled to eliminate the most intransigent
obstacle to their designs, namely, the Roman Senate.
Instead, the
Gracchi merely pleaded with senators to acquiesce to their policies; they asked the
nobles for permission to distribute to the plebeians lands that enriched the
senatorial order, and they
followed exclusively procedural avenues in doing
so so. In response, the Senate liquidated the brothers. Machiavelli insists that
the nobility were willing to negotiate with the plebs a sharing of
honors and offices; but reforms aimed at economic equality require
sterner measures and more compelling leverage.
Perhaps, then, the “defect” in the Agrarian Laws that Machiavelli mentions is
actually the defect in the Gracchi’s prudence that he explicitly criticizes if less
than fully explains: they attempted to legislate, that is, to seek lawful compliance
on the part of the nobility in a matter where straightforward compulsion is necessary.
In The Prince,
Machiavelli attributes the Gracchi’s demise to a failure
to arm themselves with a militarily organized popolo. But in the
Discourses, he attributes their demise to the imprudent, that is, humane, course by
which they pursued a domestic agenda against the nobles.
The two are not, of course,
mutually exclusive. Machiavelli seems to suggest that the Gracchi had neither the
inclination to coerce the Senate, nor, even if they did, the command of armed citizens
necessary to do so (P 9).
As tribunes, the Gracchi presided over the people collected
in their assemblies; but they lacked the authority to command the people enrolled in
legions—authority wielded by the supreme magistrates mentioned above, Agathocles and
Clearchus—praetors, respectively, of Syracuse and Heraclea.
There are limits to the
reforms that tribunes of the plebs, as opposed to consuls of Rome and praetors of
other Italian republics—magistrates publicly authorized with imperium and an armed
citizenry—can institute successfully.
The examples of Agathocles and Clearchus remind us that vivid depictions of
political violence play an important part in both The Prince and the Discourses.
In
1
2
light of my interpretation of the Gracchi episode, imagery in which the great are
chopped to pieces so as to please the people
may suggest that princes should
violently distribute the wealth of the former among the latter.
Furthermore, it is also worth considering the following:
whether
Machiavelli
implicitly criticizes the violence perpetrated against the Gracchi by the Roman
senators precisely by not recounting it in any lurid detail.
He doesn’t legitimate
these acts by aesthecizing them in the titillating manner characteristic of his
depictions of violence perpetrated by princes (or even by peoples—D
the grandi.
II.2)
against
Aristocratic elimination of plebeian champions is very much the norm in
the history of republics, especially Rome (e.g.,
III.8, III.28). Wholesale
elimination of the grandi is much more rare.
In Machiavelli estimation,
perhaps too rare.
One should speculate whether Machiavelli attempts, through such vivid imagery
in the cases of Agathocles and Clearchus, to present a possibility that normally might
not occur to adversaries of a republic’s senatorial order, especially those, like the
Gracchi, who apparently harbor no intention of becoming tyrants.
Notwithstanding such
intentions, or lack thereof, we are in a position to recognize that the examples of
Agathocles and Clearchus, who were most decidedly not destroyed by their senates,
stand neither so far removed from the case of the Gracchi, nor so far from the
prudence necessary to recognize at least some similarity in the way of tyranny and the
way of freedom.