Castigating Livy: the rape of
Lucretia and 'The Old Arcadia.'
by Debora Shuger
Sometime between the fall of 1576
and early 1577, Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey worked through the first three
books of Livy's History of Rome, "scrutinizing them," according to
Harvey's marginal note, "so far as we could from all points of view,
applying a political analysis."(1) The pivotal episode of these early
books narrates the founding of the Roman republic (1.58.1-2.5.8). This story, I
want to argue, provides the intertextual scaffolding for the final books of The
Old Arcadia, which Sidney completed sometime in 1580. While Sidney makes
Bloomian hay of Livy's account, the structural similarities between the two
works seem evident enough.
Both stories begin with a serious
sexual crime committed by a prince. In Livy, Tarquin rapes Lucretia. In Sidney,
Musidorus is on the verge of sexually assaulting the sleeping Pamela, who had
explicitly begged him to guard her chastity, when he is stopped inflagrante by
the intrusion of hostile brigands. Unlike his cousin, Pyrocles does not attempt
rape but he does deflower Philoclea, which, because Arcadian law punishes
simple fornication with death, is no small offense.
According to Livy, after Tarquin
leaves, Lucretia commits suicide in order to prove her innocence. Sidney
provides a touching (and occasionally hilarious) parody of this episode: first
Pyrocles plays Lucretia, attempting to kill himself so that "it might
justly appear that either Philoclea in defending her honour, or else he himself
in despair of achieving, had left his carcass proof of his fact but witness of
her clearness" (291).(2) His suicide, like Lucretia's, will testify to the
inviolate chastity of the injured lady. This plan failing, Pyrocles then
switches roles and plays Tarquin, informing Philanax that his "filthy
thoughts [had] sought to defile . . . a paradise of unspotted goodness"
(301). Between Pyrocles's attempts to appropriate this Livian narrative for his
own purposes, Philoclea denounces suicide with arguments borrowed from the
discussion of Lucretia's self-inflicted death that opens Saint Augustine's City
of God.(3)
In Livy, Brutus then draws the
bloody knife from Lucretia's body and vows never again to let Tarquin "nor
any other be King in Rome."(4) At this point Sidney's narrative diverges
considerably: the princes' sexual offenses lead to the "death" of a
king (but not the king who committed the offenses) and consequently to a
political crisis, but The Arcadia dismisses the possibility of reconstituting
the state on an aristocratic or republican basis as speculations of "the
discoursing sort of men" (321).
Book One of Livy's Roman History
ends with the expulsion of the Tarquins; Book Two opens with the final struggle
between Brutus's republican party and the pro-monarchical faction. A group of
young aristocrats, including Brutus's two sons, plot the return of the
Tarquins; these young men, Livy explains
had found life under the monarchy
very agreeable . . . they had been able to give a freer rein to their appetites
(libido) and become accustomed to the life of the court (more regio). Now that
everybody was governed by the same law, they missed the freedom to do as they
pleased, and began to complain that what might be liberty for others was more
like slavery for themselves. A king, they argued, was, after all, a human
being, and there was a chance of getting from him what one wanted, rightly or
wrongly; under a monarchy there was room for influence and favour; a king could
be angry, and forgive; he knew the difference between an enemy and a friend.
Law, on the other hand, was impersonal and inexorable. Law had no ears. An
excellent thing, no doubt, for paupers, it was worse than useless for the
great, as it admitted no relaxation or indulgence towards a man who ventured
beyond the bounds of mediocrity.(5)
These youthful plotters are
discovered, and Brutus sentences the ringleaders, including his sons, to death,
watching the execution with a "father's anguish."(6)
As several critics have remarked,
this scene strikingly resembles the trial of Musidorus and Pyrocles.(7) Like
Brutus's sons, Sidney's princes both defend aristocratic licence and conspire
against the state: Musidorus, one remembers, had intended to gather an army to
invade Arcadia (176); in any case, as Euarchus points out, abducting princesses
"is no less than treason" (400). Like Brutus, Euarchus sentences his
son and nephew to death, for "the name of a child should [not] have force
to change the never-changing justice" (411). The conclusion of The
Arcadia, of course, departs from Livy; Euarchus's verdict never takes effect
because Basilius awakens from his presumed death and simply forgives the
offenders.
If the foregoing parallels suggest
that Sidney based the concluding scenes of The Arcadia on Livy, the import of
this rewriting remains perplexing. The scene where Philoclea plays Augustine to
Pyrocles's Lucretia seems rather more comic than either the African saint or
the Roman historian would have countenanced. More important, The Arcadia erases
the link between rape and republicanism that stands at the ideological center
of Livy's narrative. Stephanie Jed has claimed, somewhat cryptically, that the
rape of Lucretia should not be viewed as "an inevitable prologue to Rome's
liberation but . . . [as] a historical figuration, formed and reformed to serve
various interests and needs in different historical moments."(8) Yet if
rape in Arcadia does not serve as prologue to liberation, what political needs
or interests might it figure? To what historical moment does Sidney's story of
young princes violating female chastity and upright fathers executing their
lawless sons belong?
It may be best to approach these
questions circuitously, looking first at Jed's own intriguing modernist reading
of Livy in Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Jed
sees Livy's narrative (and subsequent versions of the rape of Lucretia) as
obsessed with female unchastity - understood, of course, as an affront to male
honor rather than female autonomy.(9) Moreover, given the etymological link
between the Latin word meaning "chaste" (castus) and a term
frequently used by early Renaissance humanists to describe the correction of
faulty manuscripts (castigare), Jed concludes that "the ideal of
Lucretia's chastity is translated into the practice of textual editing . . .
For the corruption of a text, in the minds of the humanists, was not unlike a
rape."(10) Hence correcting texts ``became somewhat of a moral and
political crusade to remove the signs of their depravity, violation,
corruption, contamination, etc., and to transmit a faithful, chaste, untouched
textual tradition to posterity."(11) For Jed, Livy's narrative shapes
humanism's philological politics and politicized philology, disclosing their
link to patriarchal culture's compulsive need to control women's bodies.
Jed's argument depends on the
etymological connection between textual castigation and female chastity This
connection exists, but it is not the whole story. Both words come from an
Indo-European root meaning "to cut," which on the face of it does not
seem a particularly appropriate image for female sexual purity Isidore of
Seville's Etyrnologiae gives the real story: namely, that "castus derives
from castration (a castratione nuncupatus)"(12) Ancient writers thus use
castus and its cognates to describe eunuchs, saints, and Stoics; the terms
regularly refer to male purity - both sexual and spiritual - and male
impotence.(13) This derivation remains current through the Renaissance. John
Ferne's The Blazon of Gentrie (1586), for example, explains that Roman army
camps were called "Castra, even of the word Castrare, to geld: since that
they ought to be Castrata vel Casta."(14) Pace Jed, the same gendered
etymology surfaces in the Renaissance vocabulary of textual editing; in early
modern English, one refers to expurgating a work of objectionable material
(sexual or otherwise) as "castration": thus in 1587 the Privy Council
appointed a committee to "castrate" Holinshed's Chronicles.(15)
Jed's tendentious philology simply
erases the fact that, from antiquity through the Renaissance, "chaste
thinking" regularly concerned issues of male purity, of the (violent)
constraints placed on male sexuality, of the need to control male bodies. This
is not a small point. In all heroic societies - whether the German dans first
described by Tacitus, Spenser's Irish brigands, or the Homeric tribes or the
feudal aristocracy - free-born men do not work. Women and slaves work;
chieftains fight, raid, pillage, and (in Ascham's phrase) perpetrate "bold
bawdry." Classical and Renaissance political thinkers, in turn, are
obsessed by the problem of reducing this warrior nobility to
"civility": making brigands and warlords settle down to farming and
the professions, turning noblemen into government servants, castigating (to use
Jed's term) the lawless appetites of strong men. In Livy, sexual violence
epitomizes this more general problem of aristocratic lawlessness; the issue
dominates his account of the birth of the Roman republic, an account that
begins with Tarquin's rape and climaxes in the revolt of Brutus's sons. Livy
identifies monarchical rule with aristocratic male licence - in contrast to a
republican government, which subordinates libidinal energies to legal
constraints. Brutus's sons dislike republican government precisely because it
interferes with the sexual liberty of noble youths, subjecting their desires to
the uniform discipline of the law.
Renaissance humanists reproduce this
thematic in their own apologiae for republican rule. Thus according to
Salutati, republics demand "the sweet bridle of liberty, which is to live
according to the law," even though such a constraint "seems like
slavery to uncontrolled youth who desire to overstep freedom and live being led
by the passions."(16) Or as Hubert Languet, Sidney's friend and tutor,
puts it, "the law is reason and wisdom itself . . . But he who leans to
the king's fancies, instead of law, prefers brutish sensuality before
well-ordered discretion."(17) For early modern republican theorists, the
paradigm for this triumph of law over tyrannic lust is, significantly enough,
Brutus's execution of his sons. Buchanan thus argues in his De jure regni apud
Scotos that rulers should "apportion rewards and punishments . . . in
strict accordance with the laws," as Brutus rightly "slew his own
sons." Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy likewise defends "the
severity of Brutus" as "necessary for the maintenance of . . .
liberty," to preserve which "there is no remedy more powerful, valid,
healthful, and necessary than the killing of the sons of Brutus."(18) The
founding myth of both Roman and Renaissance republicanism associates tyranny
with the unchecked freedom of aristocratic male sexuality, and republicanism
with the severe and impartial rule of law over these libidinal transgressions.
Sidney radically rewrites this
Livian narrative. First, because Euarchus is a king, his insistence upon the
rule of law loses any republican coloration; the opposition between monarchic
and republican government - the whole point of the traditional story -
disappears from The Arcadia. Second, Sidney's princes, despite their sexual and
political transgressions, remain the heroes of the story. While the narrator
explicitly (although not very vigorously) condemns their experiments with rape
and fornication (202, 265), in general the text betrays an indulgent sympathy,
if not romantic enthusiasm, for the princes's various deceits, disguises,
seductions, and abductions.(19) But if Sidney inverts the political and ethical
implications of Livy's narrative, he retains its basic ideological structure:
the contrast between law and male sexual desire. Euarchus's judicial summation
locates the central issue with abundant clarity: by acknowledging that the
evidence for the princes' complicity in Basilius's murder is weak, he refocuses
the legal status quaestionis on the double raptus; in response to the princes'
claim that their lawbreaking should be excused as the result of the
irresistible violence of love (374-75, 402), Euarchus dryly observes: "If
that unbrindled desire which is entitled love might purge such a sickness as
this, surely we should have many loving excuses of hateful mischiefs. Nay
rather, no mischief should be committed that should not be veiled under the
name of love. For as well he that steals might allege the love of money . . .
as the adulterer the love of a woman; since they do in all speech affirm they
love that which an ill-governed passion maketh them to follow. But love may
have no such privilege" (406-07).
As both Euarchus and Brutus
understand, this refusal to privilege courtly lovers implies a refusal to
privilege courtly rank; the rule of law requires the equality of all persons
before the law. Livy's narrative makes it clear that the primary motive behind
republican constitutionalism is the need to control aristocratic lawlessness.
Nor is this view peculiar to republican theory; most ancient political thinkers
advocate the uniform rule of law to protect the weak from the rapacity of the
powerful.(20) Euarchus's refusal to excuse the princes's law-breaking as the
venial exuberance of amour courtois belongs to this tradition; as he explains,
"if the governors of justice shall take such a scope as to measure the
foot of the law by a show of conveniency . . . young men, strong men, and rich
men shall ever find private conveniences how to palliate such committed
disorders as to the public shall not only be inconvenient but pestilent"
(407). Laws exist to prevent young aristocrats from pursuing their desires. The
princes only avoid execution because Basilius wakes up.
But Basilius's
"resurrection" does not of itself exonerate the princes, who had been
convicted of fornication and abduction, not murder. They survive because
Basilius "arbitrarily sets aside the laws which condemned" them; that
is, he exercises the specifically royal prerogative of suspending the law in
the interests of equity.(21) As Brutus's sons point out, a king has ears and
can forgive. But unlike Livy, The Old Arcadia sees this as a good thing; David
Norbrook observes that ``Sidney dearly expects his readers to feel the
injustice of treating noble and magnanimous princes in the same way as anyone
else."(22) The Old Arcadia upholds the cause of young noblemen against the
austere law of the father.
One can, I think, see Sidney's
drastic rewriting of Livy in terms of Lawrence Stone's familiar "crisis of
the aristocracy." The Sidneys, from Sir Philip to Algernon, consistently
supported the "ancient powerful warlike nobility" of England as the
natural guardians of "the people's liberties" against over-mighty
rulers.(23) The final episodes of The Old Arcadia show traces of this
aristocratic resistance to Tudor centralization and the crown's attempt to
impose the authority of common law on a still-powerful nobility - a reading
consistent with at least the surface meaning of the Ister Bank eclogue.(24)
Like Spenser's Faerie Queene - the other great document of the chivalric
Protestantism championed by the Leicester/Essex faction - The Arcadia
celebrates the magnaminity, heroism, and cor gentil of the knight-errant as
superior to the "dead pitiless laws" (304) fetishized by statist
theory.(25)
Contemporary manuals of chivalry
comment explicitly on this tension between aristocratic liberty and legal
constraint. Ferne's The Blazon of Gentrie thus includes a debate between a
knight, devoted to "mercye, compassion, and curtesie," and a civil
lawyer - a debate that hinges on the relative worth of the old armigerous
nobility and the "new men" controlling the Tudor bureaucracy;(26) one
glimpses the social frictions underlying this clash in Ferne's remark that the
English "have peculiar customes and lawes (or rather in this behalfe,
common errors) which for that favor they beare to the common and rude people .
. . are fitly called common lawes."(27) Ferne has no interest in the state
as a constitutional order based on equality before the law. His political
vision centers on the individual, on the glorious deeds, innate nobility, and
heroic virtues of aristocratic natures, whose privileges the common law
attempts to bind by rules suited only to baser spirits.
This aristocratic ultramontanism,
one should note, is not confined to Renaissance chivalric handbooks.
Aristotle's Politics, despite its overall republican slant, thus affirms that
if "there be some one person, or more than one . . . whose excellence is
so pre-eminent that the excellence or the political capacity of all the rest
admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded
as part of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is
reckoned only as the equal . . . Such a man may truly be deemed a God among
men. Hence we see that legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who
are equal in birth and in capacity; and that for men of pre-eminent excellence
there is no law - they are themselves a law."(28) The true aristos
therefore "ought not be a subject - that would be as if mankind should
claim to rule over Zeus." Rather, according to seems to be the order of
Nature," Aristotle concludes, such men "should be kings in their
state for life."(29)
Sidney seems to think of his princes
in terms of this vision of nobility. The narrator consistently portrays them as
exceptional natures, resplendent in "the very shining force of excellent
virtue," "true magnaminity," "unshaked magnaminity,"
"true valor," "heroical greatness," and "extraordinary
majesty."(30) The story as a whole comes close to implying that its heroes
are a law unto themselves; the conclusion thus refers to them as "peerless
princes" (417), despite the fact that they have abducted two members of
the royal family and deceived the others. Such acts shrink to mere "venial
trespasses" because the princes possess a "pre-eminent excellence"
- the selfless virtue apparent in Pyrocles''s attempts to sacrifice himself in
order to preserve Philoclea's honor, in both the princes' contempt of death,
and in their willingness to die for each other. Observing their "noble
behaviour," Kerxenus thus concludes that "surely either fortune by
parentage or nature in creation hath made them princes" (325). They are
natural rulers.
Romances, of course, require such
heroic individualism. But the moral categories of The Arcadia are not
exclusively literary conventions; the same measure of human worth, for example,
also underwrites the Sidney-myth. Like Sidney's fiction, his legend pays
tribute to the "pre-eminent excellence" of extraordinary natures. In
his biography of Sidney, Fulke Greville thus dwells on his friend's
"gallant Soul," "rich nature," "extraordinary
greatness," "excellencie," and "extraordinary Worth" -
testimonies, Greville surmises, that "not only the Endowments of Nature,
but even the Enoblements of the Mind, and Genius, are many times inherent in
the Bloud and Linage."(31) Hence even in his early twenties, Sidney was a
natural ruler: "one of the ripest, and greatest Counsellors of
Estate" that Elizabeth possessed.(32) Greville's Sidney resembles Sidney's
princes because the same aristocratic ethos constructs both the fictional
characters and the cultural persona.
The tensions between aristocratic
individualism and royal hegemony may also lurk behind The Arcadia's romantic
comedy - not because erotic intrigues allegorize political frustrations but
because in monarchic regimes, sex is political. Thus, both Aristotle's Politics
and Justine's Epitome analyze republics in terms of constitutional issues, but
when the same texts discuss monarchies, they focus on lovers' quarrels,
jealousies, intrigues, and entanglements precisely because, under personal
rule, personal relationships have political consequences.(33)
Nor is this elision of public and
private merely a convention of historiographic discourse. One of Elizabeth's
principal means for regulating her nobles was to control, and usually block,
aristocratic marriages - a policy that may have some bearing on Basilius's
over-protective (and selfish) attempts to keep potential suitors away from his
daughters.(34) By 1580 the ambitions of both Sidney and Leicester had run afoul
of the Queen's misogamous policies.(35) Like his princes, Sidney had apparently
aspired to a forbidden royal marriage; during the late 1570s he seems to have
contemplated marrying either a German princess or the eldest daughter of
William of Orange, possibilities dropped almost surely because the Queen would
have prohibited such unions.(36) Leicester's romantic predicament during the
same years likewise seems to have an Arcadian analogue: secretly married in
1578 to Lettice Knollys while still publicly courting the jealous Queen, his
incompatible attachments to his secret lover and royal mistress mirror the
menage a trois of Pyrocles, Philoclea, and Gynecia. Before 1578, of course,
Leicester had hoped to marry the Queen, a match that would have elevated his
heir, Sidney, to royal rank. These hopes turned out to be "such stuff as
dreams are made on," but dreams of winning princesses by knightly valor
and virtue still linger in Arcadia. If Sidney's fiction escapes from history
into romance, the romance is shaped by the sexual politics of its historical
moment.(37)
The unprovability of this sort of
contextual reading need not invalidate its conclusions; the standards of
evidence in literary history are necessarily fairly generous. But it seems
problematically reductive. It shrinks The Arcadia into a chivalric
wish-fulfillment fantasy, an expression of nostalgic class-consciousness. There
are sound reasons for ascribing such attitudes to Sidney, who claimed his
"chiefest honour . . . to be a Dudley" and whose life was profoundly
marked by his ambivalent status as the potential heir to the possible future
king of England.(38) But as Renaissance aristocrats go, Sidney was also a
rather serious young man; there is a thoughtfulness about him - a cast of mind at
once reflective and intellectual - that militates against reading The Arcadia
as a naive expression of aristocratic ambition and individualism. By his
mid-twenties, Sidney was already a student of contemporary as well as ancient
history and political theory.(39) His self-appointed tutor, Hubert Languet,
wrote one of the principal statements of monarchomach theory; his friend, Sir
Henry Savile, was on the cutting-edge of English Taciteanism; Daniel Rogers,
another friend, translated Buchanan's republican De jure regni apud Scotos.(40)
It seems, therefore, at least worth exploring the possibility that The
Arcadia's astonishing misappropriation of Livy also bespeaks a more theoretical
engagement with fundamental issues of late-sixteenth century political thought.
David Norbrook has argued that The
Arcadia reflects the ideological project of Languet's Vindiciae contra
tyrannos, which would place Sidney's text squarely in the republican tradition
- the dominant tradition of Classical polittical theory (Aristotle, Cicero,
Livy), revived by fifteenth-century Florentine humanists and subsequently
championed by the Protestant monarchomachs. The aristocratic republicanism of
the monarchomachs seems particularly close to the political attitudes implicit
in Sidney's romance; as Norbrook notes, their claim that the "subaltern
magistrate" had both the right and duty to rebel against a tyrannical
prince was designed to sanction the Protestant nobility's resistance to its
Catholic rulers. They do not advocate peasant uprisings, whether Protestant or
otherwise; rather, they defend the privileges of a spiritual and social elite
against Counter-Reformation encroachments.(41)
But even a cursory examination of
the principal monarchomach tracts suggests that, except for a shared aristocratic
bias, their ideological stance differs from Sidney's at virtually every point.
These tracts (like all republican theorizing) insist on the supremacy of law;
as Languet argues, royal authority should be subordinate to "the Authority
of the Laws," for the "prince is but as the minister and executor of
the law."(42) The law, in turn, "is reason and wisdom itself,"
alone able to bridle the "brutish sensuality" and "unruly
desires" of men. Government according to law is superior to personal rule
precisely because the law is impersonal, inflexible: "intreaties nor
threats cannot make [it] to bow or bend"(43); it has, as Brutus's sons
complained, no ears. Significantly, Languet denies that a king may pardon one
whom the law condemns.(44)
Languet defends the same position as
Livy's Brutus - and Euarchus. The resemblance may not be accidental; Languet's
pseudonym in the Vindiciae is Junius Brutus, the eponymous descendent of
Sidney's model for Euarchus. But it seems impossible to identify Languet's
politics with The Arcadia's authorial voice. The whole emotional and narrative
energy of Sidney's romance resists this austerely legalistic republicanism,
which allows so little room for royal equity or the erotic escapades of young
noblemen. If Sidney pays tribute to Languet in his portrait of Euarchus, the
compliment is not unmixed.(45)
Most ancient political thinkers
exhibit republican preferences. But there is a second strand in Classical
political theory - one that has no name - that undergoes a widespread revival
in the late sixteenth century. Modern scholarship recognizes some aspects of
movement under the labels "Taciteanism" and "neostoicism,"
but these designations seem too narrow. I have chosen, rather hesitantly, to
call this strand "princely" theory because it prefers (or at least
presupposes) personal rule, although unlike absolutist theories it is not
obsessed with legitimating kingship, whether on the basis of divine right,
natural law, or paternal authority.
It may be misleading to think of
princely theory as a self-conscious ideology before the late Renaissance;
rather, it seems to have been a sixteenth-century construction amalgamating the
non-republican strands of ancient political thought - principally Plato,
Seneca, and Tacitus. This ex post facto tradition was largely the creation of
the Tacitean scavant Justus Lipsius, Sidney's contemporary and
correspondent.(46) Significantly, English interest in the Lipsian canon began
with Sidney and his circle.(47) Savile, the first English translator of
Tacitus, was Sidney's close friend; Greneway dedicated his translation of the
Annals to the Earl of Essex; Sir John Hayward, author of the Tacitean First
Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IIII, belonged to Essex's retinue.(48)
With respect to The Arcadia, the
crucial difference between republican and princely politics concerns the
relation between law and equity, a debate that goes back (as most debates do)
to Plato and Aristotle.(49) Aristotle's defense of constitutional rule in the
Politics takes issue with Plato's thesis in the Statesman that it is better to
be governed by wise rulers than by laws, because a ruler can adjust rewards and
punishment to particular cases, while the generality and rigidity of the law
make it at best an approximate instrument of justice. Plato (speaking through
the Athenian Stranger) thus argues that "the political ideal is not full
authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art
of kingship and has kingly ability . . . Law can never issue an injunction
binding on all which really embodies what is best for each."(50) Although
Plato would probably not have appreciated their support, this is precisely the
point Brutus's sons make - and precisely the characteristic of kingly authority
to which the monarchomachs objected.
Sidney may or may not have known the
Statesman. But his own treatment of law and equity strikingly resembles the
central text of princely theory - a work everybody knew: Seneca's De clementia.(51)
Seneca's essay, addressed (ironically enough) to the young Nero, deals with the
same questions posed in the final book of The Arcadia: should those who violate
the law be pardoned? should blood ties override legal rules? should youthful
transgressions be punished according to the letter of the law? should the ruler
govern by the law of the land or by a higher justice?
In Sidney, Euarchus, although
initially praised for his equity (351), declares that he will judge the princes
"not by a free discourse of reason and skill of philosophy," but
according to the strict letter of "the laws of Greece and municipal
statutes of this dukedom" (404). To Musidorus's protest that true justice
seeks "to preserve and not to destroy mankind" by exacting the
death-penalty for every "venial trespass" or ``human error"
(402), Euarchus replies that "never-changing justice" does not
"measure the foot of the law by a show of conveniency" (407). Having
discovered that the princes are his son and nephew, he reiterates these
commitments with an anguished fervor: "But, alas, shall justice halt, or
shall she wink in one's cause which had lynx's eyes in another's? Or rather,
shall all private respects give place to that holy name? Be it so, be it so.
Let my grey hairs be laid in the dust with sorrow . . . But never, never, let
sacred rightfulness fall. It is immortal, and immortally ought to be preserved.
If rightly I have judged, then rightly have I judged mine own children, unless
the name of a child should have force to change the never-changing justice. No,
no, Pyrocles and Musidorus, I prefer you much before my life, but I prefer
justice as far before you" (411).
Seneca's arguments in De clementia
offer almost a point-by-point critique of Euarchus's position. The essay defends
mercy over justice, equity over law, paternal love over impersonal rules. For
Seneca, as for Musidorus, the truly "godlike use of power" is
"to save life by crowds and universally," not to ruin its
victims.(52) The ruler is therefore superior to the laws because he can
mitigate their severity: "to save life is the peculiar privilege of
exalted station"; only the prince can exercise clementia, which
"sentences not by the letter of the law (sub formula), but in accordance
with what is fair and good."(53) A ruler, Seneca adds, must show mercy
because, to a greater or lesser degree, all persons have sinned (peccavimus
omnes).(54)
And he expands this assertion by a
lengthy discussion of how fathers should treat their errant sons. No father, he
argues, will "disinherit a son for his first offence"; indeed,
"the mildest sort of punishment ought to satisfy a father,"
especially if his son "was very youthful (adulescentulus)."(55) For
men, like "well-bred and high-spirited horses (generosi ac nobiles
equz)" should be ruled with "a loose rein" - a strikingly
aristocratic metaphor and one that stands in marked contrast to the republican
predilection for bridles.(56)
References to De clementia suffuse
Lipsius's Sixe Bookes of Politickes, which likewise defends the "way of
Clemencie . . . mercie, & pitie, to which all other vetrues do in honor
give place."(57) While this treatise, first published in 1589, could not
have influenced The Old Arcadia, its political morality is strikingly close to
Sidney's romance. In Lipsius's words: "neither ought Justice to take
offence, if our Prince do not alwayes (as we may) follow it at the heeles,
which cannot be without the ruine, and overthrow of mankind . . . But shall he
still punish with rigor? not if he regard the common profit: for severitie by
the often use thereof, weakeneth authoritie . . . . The other way of Clemencie
is farre better: and it is profitable for a good, and gracious Prince,
sometimes to passe the limites of equitie, to shew his clemencie."(58)
Some of Lipsius's further observations also have a bearing on The Arcadia
insofar as they suggest certain corrollaries that follow from valorizing equity
over the strict letter of the law. In particular, unlike virtually every prior
political thinker (except Machiavelli), Lipsius allows the use of deception for
virtuous ends. Lipsius, as he is at pains to stress, is a moralist not a
Machiavel; yet, he argues, it may "be sometimes lawfull, and reasonable to
trace out indirect courses, in this tempestuous sea of affayres of the
world."(59) For a prince, dissimulation, "which discovereth the
countenance, and covereth the mind . . . is so necessarie . . . that the old
Emperour sayd, that he knew not wel how to beare rule, that knew not how to
dissemble."(60) Without wishing to press the analogy too hard, the
morality that implicitly condones the deceits and disguises of Sidney's princes
seems of a piece with this justification of "indirect courses" for
virtuous ends. If nothing else, Lipsius's qualified defense of dissimulation suggests
that this was a live issue in the avant-garde political circles in which Sidney
moved - and that such a defense is not incompatible with a politics based on
piety and mercy, the other principal attributes of Lipsius's ideal prince. The
argument thus far seems quite straightforward: Sidney subverts Livy's
narrative, metamorphosing his republican myth celebrating the triumph of law
over libido into an apologia for aristocratic liberty, an apologia that draws
on the Elizabethan chivalric revival and the avantgarde political thought of
the late sixteenth century. These shape the climax of The Arcadia: its
valorization of equity over law, clemency over strict justice, noble natures
over impersonal codes, aristocratic privilege over legalistic impartiality. The
Arcadia transforms Livy's plot, which identifies republicanism with the
subjection of aristocratic male sexuality to the uniform discipline of law,
into a story of young noblemen's unlawful yet virtuous passions rewarded by
royal equity.
Thus far, however, the presiding
spirit of princely theory has not figured in the discussion. Sidney dearly knew
Tacitus's works, widely available in Lipsius's 1574 edition, recommending them
to his brother in a letter dated October, 1580, and drawing on Tacitus's account
of the German legions' mutiny for his description of the Arcadian peasant
revolt.(61) Tacitean ironies also suffuse the final episodes of The Arcadia,
particularly Sidney's portrait of Euarchus as a wise, impartial, and
experienced judge of men, who nevertheless misreads both the deeds and moral
character of the princes. His failure to understand what really happened
insinuates a skepticism about the ability of human reason - and hence of human
justice - to discern truth from rumor, distortion, and insinuation.(62)
Sidney's contemporaries were, in fact, struck by his skepticism, rare among
sixteenth-century Englishmen. Raleigh thus observed that "it was well
noted by that worthie gentleman Sir Philip Sidnie, that historians doe borrow
of poets, not onely much of their ornament, but somewhat of their substance.
Informations are often false, records not alwaies true, and notorious actions
commonly insufficient to discover the passions, which did set them first on
foote."(63) It is no accident that Euarchus, for all his wisdom and
impartiality, fails "to discover the passions" responsible for the
crisis in Arcadia.
This is pure Taciteanism. Historical
skepticism permeates Tacitus's writings; all that remains to the historian, he
grimly observes, are "conflicting rumors," for "so obscure are
the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source,
others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with
posterity."(64) Such doubts about the possibility of knowing the truth of
things suffuse the Annals; in the midst of recounting Germanicus's death, for
example, Tacitus comments that "it is doubtful whether . . . [the body]
exhibited the marks of poisoning. For men according as they pitied Germanicus
and were prepossessed with suspicion or were biased by partiality towards Piso,
gave conflicting accounts."(65) Like Sidney's wise judge, the Tacitean
historian cannot pierce the fog of conjecture and probabilities that enshrouds
the domain of historical and juridic inquiry.
The Annals, in fact, betray a deep
distrust of law, not only as a method of inquiry but also as an instrument of
moral reform. Attempts to legislate "public morals," Tacitus
observes, either apply "remedies more terrible than the evils" or
simply multiply criminals by criminalizing pleasures.(66) This pessimism, so
different from the typical republican celebration of law, also infiltrates
Arcadia, whose severe laws against fornication seem at once a terrible and
ineffectual remedy.
In Tacitus, there is no escape from
the realm of conjecture and rumor. In The Arcadia, however, fiction comes to
the rescue of history, with Basilius's "resurrection" solving the
epistemic crisis. The justice that triumphs in the end is poetic rather than
political; the narrative does not indicate how, lacking a deus ex machina, one
might recognize truth or virtue. Kerxenus, an Arcadian nobleman, decides that
the princes must be innocent because "heroical greatness shines in their
eyes" (325), but, except in romances, this seems a dubious inference.
As previously mentioned, Basilius's
awakening does not itself exonerate the princes, who remain guilty of various
treasonable offenses; nor does Sidney inform us why Basilius forgives them. We
pardon them because we know that they are truly good and noble, and we know
this because fiction, in the words of Sidney's Apology for Poetry, has access
to "the secretest cabinet" of men's souls.(67) The poet can make
visible the inner motives that give ethical meaning to actions and events, whereas,
according to the same work, the historian "many times . . . must tell
events whereof he can yield no cause; or if he do, it must be
poetical."(68) Poetic justice is superior to legal conjecture because the
former is based on a knowledge of the motives hidden in the heart's
"secretest cabinets." As An Apology declares, the poet alone
"maketh magnaminity and justice shine throughout all misty fearfulness and
foggy desires."(69)
The New Arcadia largely erases the
Livian subtext of the earlier version: because the princes do not violate their
ladies' chastity, the analogy with Livy's aristocratic libertines vanishes - or
rather seems to be transferred to Amphialus, whose forcible abduction of an
unwilling Philodea seems closer to Tarquin's rape than to the youthful erotic
freedoms that Brutus's sons claim as their birthright. But if The Old Arcadia's
princely politics and aristocratic ethos turn into something quite different in
Sidney's revised romance, they carry over into An Apology for Poetry. The original
Arcadia's skepticism about law as an instrument of moral reform and its claim
that inner virtue rather than outward obedience to the law - constitutes the
true subject of ethical judgment both underwrite An Apology's arguments for
poetry's superiority to law and history. The law, Sidney observes, considers
only external compliance with its precepts; nor can the historian with
"his bare was" see behind events to their motives and causes.(70) Law
and history suffer Euarchus's limitations and are liable to his mistakes. Only
the poet can disclose "all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own
natural seats laid to the view that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to
see through them."(71)
But the hero of An Apology is no
longer the prince but the poet. Mary Thomas Crane has argued that An Apology's
defense of "the natural creative power of the imagination" provided
"the first serious theoretical basis in England for aristocratic modes of
behavior and discourse."(72) This claim, however, may work better in
reverse: the aristocratic modes of behavior and discourse in The Old Arcadia
provide the ideological basis for Sidney's subsequent defense of the natural
creative power of the imagination. The Arcadian princes transfer their titles
to Sidney's "peerless poet," because, as Sidney puts it, "the
laurel crown appointed for triumphing captains cloth worthily . . . honor the
poet's triumph."(73) An Apology's metaphors signal the exchange: the
"poet's nobleness" gives his skills "a most just title to be princes
over all the rest"; "of all sciences . . . is our poet the
monarch," whose "most princely" power transforms learning into
virtue and whose "counsel can . . . direct a prince."(74) Like the
desires of noble youths, the poet's "high flying liberty of conceit"
disdains "to be tied to any . . . subjection." Rather, "with the
force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing . . .
[nature's] doings." Like the Arcadian princes, Sidney's poet, although
armed only with a quill, is an Aristotelian "god among men." And, of
course, despite their natural pre-eminence, "peerless poets" and
"peerless princes" alike - at least according to severer moralists -
show an alarming propensity for "wanton sinfulness and lustful love,"
not to mention a tendency to lie.(75)
A fine line separates An Apology for
Poetry from Sidney's apologia for Brutus's sons. If this line traces the
fissure between the corporate, aristocratic culture of the Middle Ages and the
trinity of author, imagination, and individual, then it configures this
movement not as a radical break with the past but a delicate modulation of an
inherited paradigm. Yet, because this movement begins with Tarquin's rape and
ends with a defense of the moral power of poetry, it may point to as significant
an aspect of the civilizing process (largely a process of finding something for
aristocratic men to do besides rape and pillage) as the slow submission of the
nobility to the equalizing rule of law.(76)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS
ANGELES
1 Jardine, 36-37.
2 All references to The Old Arcadia
are to Robertson's 1973 edition.
3 Compare Philoclea's arguments
against suicide (Sidney, 1973, 294, 298) with The City of God 1.17-26.
Robertson notes the parallels in her commentary on The Old Arcadia (Sidney,
1973, 471).
4 Livy, 1952, 1.59.1.
5 Livy, 2.3.24; translation adapted
from Livy, 1960, 108.
6 Livy, 1952, 2.5.8.
7 Duncan-Jones, 119; Sidney, 1973,
485.
8 Jed, 7.
9 Ibid, 5-11.
10 Ibid., 45-47.
11 Ibid., 32.
12 Isidore, 10.33.
13 For example, "nemini . . .
[philosophorum] castite, pietate, justitia, fortitudine . . . cesserit"
(Pliny, 1.22.7); "pueros . . . custos / dis . . . dicere carmen"
(Horace, Carmen saeclare, in Odes and Epodes, 6-8); "casturn ease decet
pinto poetam / ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest" (Catullus, 16.5);
"Attis / turrigeram casto vinxit amore deam" (Ovid, 4.223-24);
"tanquam castigando et castrando . . . saeculo erudimur a Domino"
(Tertullian, De cultu feminarum 2.9, in Patrologia Latina, 1:1442); "puer
qui innocentiam tenerae servet actaris . . . incorrupti corporis castimoniam
custodiat" (Ambrose, De Abraham libri duo 1.5.39, Patrologia Latina
14:459); "[Deus] castus aeternitate, nos casti fide" (Augustine, In
epistolam Joannis ad Parthos 4.9, Patrologia Latina 35:2010). Numerous
additional examples can be found in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1900-), 3:530-42, 564-72.
14 Ferne, 114. In Xenophon's
Cyropaedia, Cyrus literally castrates his bodyguard, since eunuchs "become
the more gentle by being deprived of this desire . . . . [but] not at all the
less fit for service in war" (Xenophon, 302-03).
15 Patterson, 129. Abraham Fleming,
the working editor for the 1587 edition of the Chronicles, thus entitled his
(now lost) accounts of their censorship De castratione Chronicorum and De modo
castrandi reformandiq; Chronica predicta brevis & vera relatio (See
Castanien, 27). The Oxford English Dictionary cites additional instances of
"castrate" used in this sense from the early seventeenth century
through the nineteenth. Similarly, the prefatory letter to Gascoigne's The
Poesies describes the work as having been "gelded from all flithie
phrases" (Hr).
16 Quoted in Jed, 27.
17 [Languet], 145-46. Other scholars
attribute the treatise to Du Plessis Mornay or, alternatively, to the joint
efforts of both men.
18 Buchanan, 58, 92, 143;
Machiavelli, 405, 162. See also Beacon, 7, 59.
19 For the alternative view - that
Euarchus is Arcadia's hero, the embodiment of its moral and political ideals -
see Raitiere, 35, 51; Greenlaw, 279; Lindenbaum, 181; Lanham, 316, 368-72. For
a summary of the arguments for and against Euarchus, see McCoy, 1979, 132-36.
20 Thus in Plato's Gorgias Callicles
complains that "those who framed the laws are the weaker folk, the
majority"; these "frame the laws . . . to prevent the stronger who
are able to overreach them from gaining the advantage over them" (483b-c;
in Plato, 266). See also, Ovid, Fasti 3.279: "Inde datae leges, ne fortior
omnia posset."
21 Norbrook, 96, 101.
22 Ibid., 101.
23 Algernon Sidney, "Court
Maxims," 71, 131-33; quoted Worden, 188. The Cabinet-Council - often
attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, although first published by Milton in 1658 -
makes similar claims (see Parker, 1:517).
24 Stone, 29, 266, 269, 223; McCoy,
1989, 2-3, 34-35; Whigham, 72-73; Sinfield, 398.
25 Helgerson, 40-59.
26 Ferne, 35-42, 97.
27 Ibid., 84.
28 Aristotle, Politics
3.13.1284a3-18 in Aristotle, 2:2037. In his edition of the Politics, Louis le
Roy glosses this passage with a long quotation from Plato's Gorgias in which
Callicles defends the rule of the strong over the rule of law (34).
Interestingly, the narrator's remark in The Arcadia that "one man's
sufficiency is more available than ten thousand's multitude - so ill balanced
be the extremities of popular minds, and so much natural imperiousness there
rests in a well formed spirit" (364) seems to echo Callicles's claim (as
summarized by Socrates) that "one sensible man is often more powerful than
ten thousand fools and it is right that he should rule and they be
subjects" (Gorgias 490a). See also Botero, 14.
29 Aristotle, 3.13.1284630-34.
30 Sidney, 1973, 314, 294, 302, 325.
31 Greville, The Epistle Dedicatory
and 7, 10, 32.
32 Ibid., 27.
33 Aristotle, Politics,
5.10.1310a-1313a; Justin, 1.1-3, 2.7. One should add that the politicization of
personal relationships in monarchic historiography concerns not only erotic
relations but all intimate ties of blood or affinity, particularly fraternal
bonds.
34 Stone, 605-06.
35 As Blair Worden has pointed out,
the title-page for the 1593 Arcadia associates Musidorus with Leicester's
Dudley arms, Pyrocles with Sidney's family crest (The Sound of Virtue, 313).
36 Duncan-Jones, 132-34; Wilson,
238.
37 Critics have long suspected that
The Arcadia presents some sort of veiled commentary on Elizabethan court
politics. Most of these topical readings, however, from Greenlaw's 1913 article
entitled "Sidney's Arcadia as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory" to
Blair Women's massive 1996 book, The Sound of Virtue, have struggled to connect
Sidney's romance to the controversy over the French match; these readings thus
focus almost exclusively on Basilius, whose neglect of princely duties and
foolish infatuation corresponds to and critiques Elizabeth's romantic
involvement with the Duke of Anjou. Yet even if one accepts the analogy between
Basilius and Elizabeth (which has never seemed to me wholly convincing), this
cannot be central to The Arcadia because the romance is not about Basilius,
whose adventures and amours have no conceivable relation to the French match.
38 Sidney, 1824, 264.
39 See his letter of 18 October
1580, to Robert Sidney, reprinted in Sidney, 1962, 130-33.
40 Norbrook, 93.
41 Ibid., 98.
42 Languet, 63, 152. See also
Buchanan, 92, 129; Machiavelli, 405, 408-09.
43 Languet, 145-46.
44 Ibid., 153.
45 On Sidney's somewhat mixed
feelings towards Languet, see Duncan-Jones, 71.
46 Salmon, 1991, 170-71.
47 Salmon, 1989, 205; Levy, 1987, 9.
48 Ibid., 173-74.
49 Sidney's interest in the relation
between law and equity may owe something to Gabriel Harvey, who in 1578
participated in a disputation before the Queen on whether "clemency was
more praiseworthy in a magistrate than severity (clementia magis in Principe
laudanda quam seueritas)" (Nichols, 2:109-14). See also Samuel Daniel's
moving verse epistle "To Sr. Thomas Egerton," which praises equity
over written laws that, as in Livy, "haue nor eares nor sight"
(Daniel, 1:191-98). Daniel also had ties to the Sidney circle through his
patron, the Countess of Pembroke.
50 Plato, Statesman 294a.
51 "Clemency" (or
clementia) and equity both translate the Greek epieikeia.
52 De clementia 1.26.5 in Seneca,
1:429.
53 De clementia, 1.5.7; 2.7.3.
Viperani makes a similar point in his 1569 De rege, et regno liber: "to
follow absolute legality, and to do nothing from equity or mercy, what else is
this but a display of iniquity and tyrannical ruthlessness" (quoted in
Tuck, 34).
54 De clementia, 1.6.3.
55 Ibid., 1.14.1; 1.14.7.
56 Ibid., 1.24.2.
57 Ibid., 33.
58 Lipsius., 32-33.
59 Ibid., 114. Conversely, Cicero's
De officiis, a central text for both republican and monarchic political thought
in the Renaissance, prohibits deception since its basic premise is the
inseparability of bonum and utile.
60 Ibid., 117.
61 Greenblatt, 354. For example,
Sidney's rather cynical observation on the rebellion in Arcadia, that
"indeed, no ill way it is in such mutinies to give them some occasion of
such service as they may think in their own judgements may countervail their
trespass. . . . [Hence] their fellows, that were most glad to have such a mean
to show their loyalty, dispatched most of them with a good rule: that to he
leaders in disobedience teacbeth ever disobedience to the same leaders"
(131-32), seems to echo Tacitus's remarks on the mutiny of the German legions
(Annals 1.44, 49).
62 On Sidney's historical
skepticism, see Woolf, 35, 132.
63 Ibid., 52.
64 Tacitus, Annals 3.19.
65 Ibid., Annals 2.73. Compare The
Arcadia's final comment on Gynecia: "so uncertain are mortal judgements,
the same person most infamous and most famous, and neither justly" (416).
66 Ibid., Annals 3.27; 3.53-54.
67 Sidney, 1970, 26.
68 Ibid., 33.
69 Ibid., 48.
70 Ibid., 26, 33.
71 Ibid., 29.
72 Crane, 189.
73 Sidney, 1970, 27, 51.
74 Sidney, 1970, 23, 38, 41, 29.
75 Sidney, 1970, 11, 14, 17, 58.
76 See Levy, 1986, 10.
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