Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli’s Mandragola

Epicurean Themes in Mandragola

What is the illness being cured in Mandragola—and who is being cured of it? Ostensibly, it is Lucrezia who is sick. The young and beautiful wife of Messer Nicia, she has failed to provide her elderly husband with a child. Callimaco, posing as a doctor, declares that her urine “shows weakness of the kidneys” and recommends that she consume a potion made of mandrake root to cure her infertility. But the audience, together with most of the characters, knows the truth: that Lucrezia is not sick at all. Messer Nicia is being tricked into allowing Callimaco to sleep with his wife, and if a baby results, it will not be because Lucrezia has been cured of anything. She will just have been impregnated by a younger and more virile suitor.

From this perspective, the medical terminology that pervades Mandragola—doctors, remedies, and potions—is entirely farcical, intended only to produce laughs and move the drama forward. But perhaps there is another way to read the story? While it may be true that Lucrezia’s body is perfectly healthy, her soul is quite disturbed by the measure of Epicurean philosophy. Early in the play, Lucrezia is described as not just “longing . . . for children” but actually “dying” of this frustrated desire. Other characters are similarly distressed. Ligurio, the parasite, is unsure where he will find his next meal; Sostrata, Lucrezia’s mother, is anxious about her daughter’s financial future; Callimaco, newly arrived from France, is so maddened by his infatuation with Lucrezia that he threatens suicide; even poor Frate Timoteo is annoyed by the women he relies upon from donations. No one is happy, even by the relatively modest standards of Epicurean tranquility (ataraxia).

One has only to read Mandragola’s first song to recognize that Machiavelli indeed wants audiences to interpret the unfolding drama in Epicurean terms. In this song, Machiavelli outlines a broadly Epicurean ethical perspective in which the primary aim of life is pleasure, achieved through the minimization of bodily pain and psychological distress:

Because life is brief

and many are the pains

which, living and struggling, everyone sustains,

let us follow our desires,

passing and consuming years,

because whoever deprives himself of pleasure,

to live with anguish and with worries,

doesn’t know the tricks

of the world, or by what ills

and by what strange happenings

all mortals are almost overwhelmed.

These sentiments are particularly reminiscent of Lucretius’s plea on behalf of Epicurean therapeutics in Book 2 of De rerum natura:

O wretched minds of men, O poor blind hearts!

How great the perils, how dark the night of life

where our brief hour is spent! Oh, not to see

that nature demands no favor but that pain

be sundered from the flesh, that in the mind

be a sense of joy, unmixed with care and fear!

(Lucretius 1977, 2.14–19) ⁴

By placing this allusion to Lucretius at the beginning of the play, Machiavelli suggests that Mandragola’s central conflict is not Callimaco’s desperate attempt to bed the reluctant Lucrezia, but rather one that exists within the psychology of one or more of its characters. This psychological conflict involves false beliefs about the world that impede the way to true happiness, and its resolution—not the success or failure of Callimaco’s stratagems—will mark the final settlement of the play.

In DRN, Lucretius follows tradition in figuring Epicureanism as a therapeutic philosophy that heals its practitioners by ridding them of false beliefs. But he also analogizes his own poetic inventiveness to medical practice, comparing his use of artistry to conceal the “dark subject” of his poem to the trickery of doctors, who coax children into drinking vile potions “by painting the cup-lip round / with sweet and golden honey.”

thus the child,

young and unknowing, is tricked and brought to set

the cup to his lip; meanwhile he swallows the bitter

wormwood, and though deceived is not infected,

but by this trick grows well and strong again

(Lucretius 1977, 1.938–942)

This analogy finds renewed expression in Mandragola, which dramatizes someone “young and unknowing” being fooled into drinking a cure. Indeed, the fourth song characterizes the lies and deceptions used to dupe Lucrezia in remarkably similar terms:

How pleasant is the trick

conducted to its imagined and dear end,

that rids one of worry

and makes every bitter thing that’s tasted sweet.

Oh, remedy high and rare,

you show the straight path to wandering souls. . .

Even Machiavelli’s reference here to a “remedy high and rare” illuminating “the straight path to wandering souls” recalls Lucretius, who characterizes Epicurean enlightenment in terms of intellectual elevation, writing that “nothing is sweeter than to dwell in peace / high in the well-walled temples of the wise, / whence looking down we may see other men / wavering, wandering, seeking a way of life” (Lucretius 1977, 2.7–10). Elsewhere in DRN, the phrase “straight path” refers to unimpeded atomic trajectories (Lucretius 1977, 2.249). Epicurus himself is praised for having “revealed the Highest Good, what it is we all / pursue, and showed the Way, the modest path / by which to reach it down the true, straight road” (Lucretius 1977, 6.26–28). And in a passage that Machiavelli almost certainly echoes in the opening lines of the Discourses, Lucretius describes himself as forging a trackless literary path: “No paths in the Muses’ places! None before / has walked where I walk. I love to find new founts / and drink; I love to gather fresh new flowers / and seek the laureate’s crown whence Muses never / ere now have veiled the brow of any man” (Lucretius 1977, 4.1–5).

Lucretius’s multiple references to paths testify to his profound debt to the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, from whom it is speculated he borrowed the very idea of didactic poetry (Brown 2007). In Mandragola, the name Callimachus is given to Lucrezia’s lover, Callimaco. Other names have broadly Lucretian associations, too. Consider Callimaco’s faithful servant, Siro. It has been suggested that “Siro” is an adaptation of “Syrus,” the name given to slaves in Terence’s comedies Heauton timoroumenos and Adelphoe (McLaughlin 2015, 128). But this is not the only possibility. The name Siro also belonged to the founder of a prominent Epicurean school in Naples in the first century BCE. A former student of Zeno of Sidon and close associate of Philodemus, Siro attracted a vibrant community of Epicurean devotees. Indeed, his circle included Virgil, who spent a total of six years in residence and inherited Siro’s villa and the surrounding gardens upon his death. Virgil memorializes his teacher in several of his early poems (e.g., Catalepton 5: “We are spreading sail for blissful heavens, in quest of noble Siro’s learned lore, and will free our life from all worries” [2001, 489]). Even Cicero’s scathing critique of Epicureanism in De finibus lauds Siro as an “excellent and very learned” man (1914, 2.119).

More likely still is the possibility that Callimaco’s beloved is named after Lucretius himself. Commentators have frequently interpreted the name Lucrezia to be a thinly veiled reference to Lucretia, the Roman matron legendary for having committed suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius. There is abundant textual support for this inference, including Callimaco’s statement that he was initially gripped by desire when he overheard someone praising Lucrezia’s extraordinary qualities; his use of blackmail to secure her total capitulation; and the liaison’s transformative effect on the Calfucci household. But the name Lucrezia is also a feminized version of Lucretius, an association that finds support in the network of Epicurean allusions that suffuse Mandragola. Moreover, this connection helps to make sense of the play’s most pivotal event: Lucrezia’s moral conversion in Act 5. While the name Lucretia captures well enough the sexual modesty that Lucrezia demonstrates in Mandragola’s early scenes, it fails to make intelligible her climactic decision to embrace a life of sexual transgression. Instead, Lucrezia’s transformation resembles the description of Epicurean illumination that Lucretius offers in DRN. Like a true Epicurean convert, Lucrezia embarks on a wholly new “path” to happiness—one that involves discarding her fear of God and replacing it with the “straight road” of pleasure. Lucrezia is relieved of her anxiety by changing what it is that she wants, in response to a realization about how certain dark forces of the world cannot be securely defeated. ⁵

Lucretius credits the “god-like” Epicurus for introducing mankind to these twin insights, one about the “straight road” to happiness and the other about the “evil . . . widespread in human life” (1977, 6.27–28). In Mandragola, Callimaco plays the role of Epicurus in bringing Lucrezia to accept the true choice before her. This parallel is made clear in Lucrezia’s otherwise baffling postcoital speech to Callimaco. As reported by Callimaco, Lucrezia showed reluctance until she “tasted” his kisses—at which point her mood suddenly changed and she announced to him, “I take you for lord, master, and guide; you are my father, my defender, and I want you to be my every good” (Machiavelli 1981, 5.4). This declaration is an unmistakable echo of Lucretius’s exaltation of Epicurus in Book 3 of DRN:

You are our father, founder, patron, teacher;

yours are the precepts; from your sacred page,

as bees in meadows taste of every flower,

we likewise feed on all your Golden words,

golden, most worthy of eternal life. (1977, 3.9–13)

Having been forced to compromise her moral virtue by the tetrapharmakos of Callimaco’s “astuteness,” Nicia’s “stupidity,” Sostrata’s “simplicity,” and Timoteo’s “wickedness,” Lucrezia is finally cured of false and damaging beliefs about where true happiness lies (Machiavelli 1981, 5.4). ⁶

Beware the Honeyed Cup

Machiavelli wryly suggests that Mandragola is itself a honeyed cup meant to deliver to audiences the same bitter truths that Lucrezia learns through Callimaco’s sweet kisses: “I would wish / that you [spectators] might be tricked as she was.” This intention also finds expression in the frontispiece to Mandragola, which features a centaur playing violin. In chapter 18 of The Prince, Machiavelli’s reference to Chiron emphasizes his creaturely nature as something half-man and half-beast. ⁷ The frontispiece to Mandragola draws attention to another dimension of Chiron’s mythical persona, namely his proficiency in the medical arts. Chiron was said to have invented the art of healing and to have been especially skilled in the administration of herbal remedies (Hyg. Fab. 138, 274; Plin. HN 7.196–197; Ov. Fast. 5.379–414; Stat. Silv. 1.4.98). These pharmacological skills were central to the tutelage he gave his students: most famously Asclepius, who eventually surpassed his teacher to become the god of medicine (Pind. Pyth. 3.1–7 and Nem. 3.52; Hom. Il. 4.217–219; Apollod. Bibl. 118–122), but also Achilles, who is reported to have shared his knowledge of herbal cures with his lover Patroclus (Hom. Il. 11.828–832: “sprinkle mild drugs . . .”; see also Plato, Rep. 391c; Paus. 3.18.10–16; Pind. Nem, 3.43; Stat. Achil. 1.105, 1.478, 2.96).

In Mandragola, the healing figure of Chiron is depicted playing a violin, a modern version of the stringed instrument most closely associated with him, the lyre. Chiron’s lyre was key to the human, civilizing side of his educational program, which helped students gain control over their most savage and unruly impulses. While Chiron’s success with Achilles was decidedly mixed, it was not entirely fruitless: Homer, Statius, and Ovid relay scenes in which Achilles soothes himself (and others) with music (Homer Il. 9.189; Statius Achil. 1.188–194; Ovid Ars am. I.11–12; Fast. 379). By depicting this therapeutic side of Chiron in the frontispiece, Machiavelli suggests that Mandragola serves a similar didactic purpose, while also indicating how it will bring about this state of heightened emotional control: by giving musical and performative expression to the basic principles of Epicurean medicine.

But is this all that Mandragola amounts to—a Renaissance adaptation of the literary trick that Lucretius performs in DRN? Readers of The Prince know to be wary of the lessons that Machiavelli pours into seemingly familiar cups, and indeed a closer look at Mandragola reveals a major departure from DRN concerning the “path” to happiness. Whereas Lucretius follows Epicurean precedent in treating sex as a marginal human experience, unnecessary for the attainment of eudaimonia, Machiavelli accepts sex as being an essential component of our physical and psychological well-being. Callimaco is tortured by his love for Lucrezia, while Lucrezia, Nicia, and Sostrata are obsessed with Lucrezia’s childlessness. Moreover, Machiavelli nowhere suggests that we should address these feelings by distancing ourselves from such desires. Lucrezia has attempted to do so, cultivating a nature that is “extremely onestissima and in all ways alien to love” (Machiavelli 1981, 1.1). But Machiavelli treats her sexual reserve as a joke, relating how she would rather spend her nights praying for hours on a cold floor than climb into bed with her own husband, pregnancy be damned (Machiavelli 1981, 2.6). Moreover, Mandragola’s “happy ending” turns on the consummation, transmission, and perpetuation of erotic desire, not its subordination. Lucrezia appears to reciprocate Callimaco’s libidinous desire for her; Callimaco himself is excited by the prospect of having sex with Lucrezia regularly; Nicia feels confident that he will soon have an heir; even Ligurio is rewarded with a place at the Calfucci table, suggesting the rich meats and fine wines that Epicurus analogizes with sex.

Mandragola is even further afield from Lucretius’s lengthy critique of erotic desire itself. Without explicitly breaking with his teacher, Lucretius intensifies Epicurus’s skepticism about sexual desire by characterizing it as an empty desire—that is, a want that eludes final satisfaction because it owes its existence to a false belief. Lucretius remains within the ambit of orthodox Epicureanism when he acknowledges the embodiment of male sexual desire, tracing it to the testicles and their development as men physically mature (1977, 4.1034–1040). But more fascinating—and frightening—to Lucretius is the role that images play in stimulating erotic desires, which otherwise remain in a state of latency. While adolescence may cultivate the body’s capacity for sexual experience, Lucretius observes, we only have these experiences at the prompting of external stimuli. This is no small point, as it puts pressure on the very idea that erotic desires are “natural” in the sense relevant to Epicurean philosophy. What matters for Epicureanism is not the existence of a biological capacity for the desire—this has to be true of any desire we experience—but rather its character as a spontaneous and self-sufficient human experience. A person does not need to see a loaf of bread to feel hungry or a glass of water to feel thirsty, marking these out as truly natural desires. But it takes “images [simulacra], sloughed off by some person, / that tell of a lovely face and soft, smooth skin” to “rouse and tickle” a young man’s sexual organs, bringing to life their hidden powers (Lucretius 1977, 4.1032–1034).

Lucretius stresses again and again how the image-oriented structure of erotic desire makes it a conduit into the dangerous world of unreality. The first sexual experience an adolescent male has is often a simulated one, he points out, in which a dream-image causes him to ejaculate while alone in his bed “as if the act were done” (Lucretius 1977, 4.1035). Lovers are haunted by images of their beloved even after they are gone (Lucretius 1977, 4.1061–1062). We compulsively idealize the objects of our desire, actively reforming their image within the mind’s eye in order to heighten our own erotic excitement:

Sallow is “honeyed,” unkempt, unwashed, “informal”;

she stares: “a goddess!” all bone and muscle: “a fawn!”

Dumpy? “She’s exquisite! Tiny – but what a mind!”

Huge and clumsy? “Portentous! Pure dignity!”

Hare-lip? Tongue-tied? “No, lisping,” “self-effacing!”

Shameless? A hideous bore? No, “Wisdom’s lamp!”

Stringy and thin? Not long to live? “She’s dainty,

a darling!” Bad cough? One foot in the grave? No, “frail!”

Bulging? Huge-uddered? “A Ceres, suckling Bacchus!”

Pug-nosed? “A saucy nymph!” Thick-lipped? “For kissing!”

And so on and so on: the rest is long to tell. (Lucretius 1977, 4.1160–1170)

Even the sexual act itself is imbued with fantasy, Lucretius maintains—the fantasy of total incorporation, whereby we believe it possible to impress ourselves so fully into our beloveds that we finally become one with them (1977, 4.1105–1114).

This link with imagery, and ultimately fantasy, is what makes erotic longing so disturbing to Lucretius, and why he implicitly reclassifies it as an empty desire. Unlike natural desires, which arise from needs internal to the self and attach themselves to things that possess the ability to meet these needs, erotic desire, according to Lucretius, operates entirely on the plane of appearance. Sex is not the pursuit of something real, that we perceive through images—it is the pursuit of an image, which, as such, can never be securely grasped or possessed. Even should we manage to acquire the physical object represented by the desired image, we experience no relief from our suffering, as Lucretius stresses when he directly contrasts erotic desire with the two prototypical natural desires, hunger and thirst. “Now food and drink are taken into the body, / but since they settle into predetermined spots / our need for bread and wine is readily filled,” he writes.

But from a human face and soft, smooth skin

the body gets nothing to use but simulacra –

slight things, poor hopes the wind oft whips away.

As one in dreams who, thirsting, looks for water

but finds none that might cool his fevered flesh;

(he struggles to reach the fluid – vain simulacra;

midway a roaring river he drinks and thirsts)

so Venus deludes fond lovers with simulacra.

They view bare bodies but get no fill of viewing;

hands chafe but win no substance for young flesh,

though they roam wildly over all the body.

(Lucretius 1977, 4.1091–1104)

No wonder he considers erotic desire to be a frightful thing (dira; Lucretius 1977, 4.1090).

Lucretius’s point here is not just to warn about the immediate havoc that erotic desire wreaks on ataraxia by fomenting uncertainty, frustration, disappointment, humiliation, jealousy, grief, and other forms of emotional upset. He is also underscoring the damaging effects that love has on rational cognition, and ultimately our ability to develop the intellectual virtues necessary to cure any form of psychological distress. As an Epicurean, Lucretius believes that happiness requires both theoretical and practical wisdom—that is, an accurate understanding of the cosmos and the ability to use that information to deliberate effectively about how to live. The “wound” inflicted by love destroys these capacities, leaving the afflicted unable to reason their way out of erroneous beliefs about where happiness truly lies (Lucretius 1977, 4.1049, 4.1120).

In the end, Lucretius determines erotic desire to be so damaging to our happiness that he recommends obliterating it completely. He indicates that when the “cancer” of erotic desire is “fed . . . it lives and grows”; therefore, the remedy that Lucretius prescribes is one in which lustful impulses are dissipated as soon as they appear—before “folly’s a fever and pangs are millstones” (1977, 4.1068, 4.1069). When even a single “drop of passion . . . trickles into our heart,” Lucretius recommends lancing the wound with promiscuity. Rather than allow our sexual energy to be “trapped by one lone love,” he writes, we should “turn our thoughts elsewhere, and jet our humors into someone else’s body” because romantic feelings are more easily suppressed when we are “distracted by new bruises” (Lucretius 1977, 4.1059–1060, 4.1063–1066).

In Mandragola, Lucretius’s pathological account of erotic desire surfaces in the figure of Callimaco, the “miserable lover” driven to madness by his feelings for Lucrezia (Machiavelli 1981, prologue). As described by Callimaco himself, love is a kind of violent and disabling torture: “from every side,” he complains, “such a desire to be her at once attacks me that, from the soles of my feet to my head, I feel completely altered: my legs tremble, my insides move about, my heart is torn from my breast, my arms give up their strength, my tongue becomes mute, my eyes are dazzled, my brain spins” (Machiavelli 1981, 4.1). At times, Callimaco’s inner turmoil becomes so severe that he believes that he is actually dying; at other times, he wishes that he would die in order to escape his suffering (Machiavelli 1981, 1.3, 2.6, 4.1, 4.2, 4.4). More certain is the fact that Callimaco’s desire for Lucrezia is running him off the Epicurean path to redemption. Unable to sleep, eat, converse, or “take pleasure in anything,” poor Callimaco is so plagued by so “many worries” about winning Lucrezia’s affection that he openly encourages Ligurio to stimulate his flagging hopes with fantasies they both know to be false—hardly the retrenchment into logic and rationality that Epicureanism would advise (Machiavelli 1981, 1.3).

While Callimaco’s suffering in Mandragola is very real, Machiavelli uses parody to guard against audiences taking it too seriously. Erotic desire can sometimes yield intense frustration, of course, but the idea that it is fundamentally toxic is a bit much. Also telling is the fact that Callimaco does not ultimately relieve himself by dissipating his lust, as Lucretius advises, or by learning to respond to it with caution and good sense, as Epicurus originally held. Rather, Callimaco is healed by finally having the risky sexual encounter with Lucrezia that he has dreamed about. Lucrezia herself emerges from their rendezvous a “rooster”—the sacrificial animal that Socrates pledges to Asclepius on his deathbed, in return for finally healing Socrates of the sicknesses inherent to mortal life (Machiavelli 1981, 5.5; cf. Phd. 118a).

Mandragola’s anti-Epicurean thrust is even more apparent in the dramatic resolution achieved in the play’s closing scenes. While Callimaco’s anxieties are finally soothed, his thinking is emphatically not purged of fantasy and illusion. Quite the opposite: Lucrezia, we learn, has used Callimaco’s love sickness to energize a new and even more potent fantasy—the dream of complete patriarchal mastery. It is Lucrezia’s totalizing vision of masculine authority that finally satisfies Callimaco. While the physical side of their nighttime encounter leaves him “troubled,” Callimaco feels so amply rewarded by Lucrezia’s uncharacteristic pronouncement that she will now defer to him in all things that he reports afterward that it was her “words” that made him “the most happy and contended man that was ever in the world” (Machiavelli 1981, 5.4). Indeed, Callimaco is not the only character whose happiness in the final scene is owed to some kind of illusion. Nicia believes that Lucrezia is now fit to bear him a legitimate heir, when it is more likely that she will be impregnated by her clandestine lover; he also believes, wrongly, that he stands unchallenged in the role of paterfamilias within the Calfucci household, when in fact Lucrezia has secretly pledged her loyalty to Callimaco and (even more quietly) usurped the role of domestic sovereign for herself. Similarly, Timoteo and Sostrata remain unaware of Callimaco’s true identity and how it puts their own reputations and security at risk.

How You Like Them (Love) Apples?

In the end, Mandragola invites audiences to consider, and ultimately reconsider, Lucretian ideas about happiness. Although the play endorses certain foundational commitments of Epicurean philosophy, including the view that happiness is the supreme good and produced by the satisfaction of desire, it challenges other positions that Epicureans have taken, most notably Lucretius’s attempt to segregate erotic desire from the so-called natural desires in order to secure the rational clarity necessary for ethical deliberation. At the crux of Machiavelli’s critique of Lucretius is a more receptive posture toward fantasy and illusion. Whereas Lucretius hews closely to the Epicurean precept that happiness is possible only when the mind has been purged of untrue beliefs, Machiavelli sees happiness as being compatible with ignorance, deception, and error—so long as they are effectively managed and coordinated by someone like Lucrezia.

This divergence between DRN and Mandragola concerning the value of illusion is also expressed pharmacologically. ⁸ In DRN, Lucretius compares the health-promoting properties of Epicurean philosophy with those of wormwood, a bitter herb that was used by Romans primarily as a purgative. Wormwood infusions were thought to stimulate the body’s expulsive processes, helping to rid the body of foreign or unwanted substances, making them especially useful in treating intestinal parasites. Its evacuative powers also made it valuable to women as an emmenagogue and abortifacient. Lucretius’s analogizing of Epicureanism and wormwood implicitly draws on these pharmacological associations, reinforcing DRN’s characterization of psychological health in terms of the purgation of false beliefs, superstitions, and irrational fears.

In Mandragola, however, the herbal remedy of choice is the mandrake. Given the play’s dramatic emphasis on pregnancy, the mandrake’s most obvious pharmacological relevance is its promotion of fertility and conception. In this respect alone, Mandragola parts ways with DRN: for Machiavelli, health is a product of vigorous creative and gestational processes, not eliminative ones. But also relevant to Mandragola’s plot is the mandrake’s raunchier profile as the “love apple,” a powerful aphrodisiac that was said to owe its sexually stimulative powers to its distinctly phallic shape. Renaissance audiences would have recognized that Ligurio’s mandrake potion was intended to make Lucrezia more receptive to Callimaco’s sexual advances, and this bawdier subtext introduces the play’s thematic interest in the curative powers of simulacra.

In this same direction, and even further afield from the Lucretian ideal of rational clarity, is the mandrake’s reputation for causing impairment and intoxication. A member of the nightshade family, mandrake was often associated with opium, belladonna, hemlock, hellbore, and henbane, a collection of drugs valued primarily for their narcotic and anesthetic properties. The presence of hyoscine, a potent alkaloid, in the mandrake root makes it poisonous in large doses, affecting the central nervous system in such a way as to produce hallucination, delirium, coma, and even death. But in reduced amounts it acts as a sedative, making it useful for inducing sleep and even unconsciousness in preparation for surgery (Apul. Met. 10.9.11–12; Diasc. 4.75). Pliny the Elder reports that mandrake was sometimes called circaeon, “the herb of Circe,” indicating that it was believed to be the pharmakon used by Circe to mesmerize her victims before transforming them into animals (HN 25.147; see also Diasc. 4.76), while Hippocrates—in keeping with the ancient medical principle that a poison, when handled correctly, could remedy its own most dangerous effects—recommends small doses of mandrake as a cure for mania and suicidal thoughts (Loc. Hom. 39).

By substituting mandrake for wormwood, Machiavelli underscores his interest in recuperating the therapeutic potential of fantasy and illusion and signals the presence of a second Roman literary influence: Ovid. The influence of Ovid on Machiavelli’s thought has not been extensively researched, despite the fact that Machiavelli explicitly names Ovid as being one of the writers with whom he spends his days in exile in his letter to Vettori of December 1513. Machiavelli’s statement that he spends his afternoons consumed by the “amorous passions and . . . loves [amorose passioni e . . . amori]” of writers like Ovid points especially to the Amores, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris. A clear reference to Ovid’s love poetry can be found in Machiavelli’s Clizia, in a lengthy monologue about the hardships endured by soldierly drawn almost verbatim from Ovid’s Amores 1.9 (Saxonhouse 2000). The influence of Ovid on Mandragola is more subtle, however, and draws instead on Ovid’s playful critique of Lucretian sexual ethics in Ars. In Mandragola, Machiavelli advances a version of Ovid’s argument in Ars that Epicureanism’s hedonic aims are more fully realized when erotic desire is allowed to roam freely than when it is suppressed. Moreover, both texts reconfigure “virtue” as a kind of erotic artistry whereby fantasies and illusions are deliberately used to heighten the experience of erotic pleasure.

One of the distinctive features of Ars is its subversive appropriation of Lucretian language and imagery. Consider, for example, the speculative history of human development in Book 2, which inverts Lucretius’s account in DRN. According to Lucretius, “the human race began to soften [genus humanum primum mollescere coepit]” with the advent of monogamy and marriage, which permitted men and women to know “their own begotten children” (1977, 5.1013–1014). Ovid, however, tells a less respectable story in which the “sweet delights” of casual sex are credited for having “softened savage spirits” in mankind’s earliest days (2001, 2.477; Miller 1997, 390). ⁹ Ovid’s phrasing here—Blanda truces animos fertur mollisse voluptas—echoes Lucretius’s references to the soothing effects of pleasure and suggests a deeper vein of argument about the socially constructive power of sex, positioned in reply to Lucretius’s more cynical perspective (1977, 2.966, 4.1085, 4.1263, 5.178). For Lucretius, it is not sex but parental love that opens the door to civilization. Recalling DRN’s famous dedication to a motherly, nourishing Venus, Lucretius traces the beginning of ordered social life to when “Venus took toll of strength” through “children’s smiles,” which “easily tamed their parents’ prideful hearts [blanditiis facile ingenium fregere superbum]” (1977, 5.1017–1020). Ovid, by contrast, attributes the softening of harsh feelings to the relief of sexual release, accomplished by an eroticized Venus (“they had no teacher to show them what to do / Venus did her work without sweet art” [2001, 2.479–480]).

Ovid’s reply to Lucretius in these passages is built on the wisdom contained in his earlier advice to philandering lovers about how to avoid the wrath of their betrayed girlfriends: “don’t forgo sex: all peace is in that one thing” (2001, 2.413). Ovid recalls this maxim before launching into the pseudo-Lucretian anthropology discussed previously. Explaining how to deal with a jealous lover, Ovid presents sex as having the power to restore calm and renew strained relationships:

Throw your arms straightaway around her snow-white neck,

and let the weeping girl fall on your chest.

Kiss her who weeps, make sweet love to her who weeps,

there’ll be peace: this is the one way anger’s dissolved.

When she’s truly raging, when she seems fixed on war,

then sue for peace in bed, she’ll be gentle.

There Concordia dwells with grounded arms:

there, trust me, is the place where grace is born.

Doves that once fought, now bill and coo,

whose murmur is of caressing [blanditias] words.

(2001, 2.457–466)

This passage makes heavy use of Lucretian vocabulary, especially foedera, Lucretius’s term for the laws and pacts of nature, to address a distinctly Lucretian theme (the resolution of strife, and especially civil strife, which Lucretius traces to the ill effects of envy) using a memorably Lucretian pairing (love versus strife, personified in the proem to DRN as Venus and Mars). Indeed, Ovid would appear to be directly mimicking Lucretius’s renowned description of Venus’s power to “bless our mortal race with peace and calm.”

though Mars the War Lord rules

war’s savage works, yet often he throws himself

into your arms, faint with love’s deathless wound,

and there, with arching neck bent back, looks up

and sighs, and feeds a lustful eye on you

and, pillowed, dangles his life’s breath from your lips.

Then, as he falls back on your sacred body,

Lady, lean over and let sweet utterance pour

from your holy lips – a plea of peace for Rome.

(Lucretius 1977, 1.31–40)

However, these parallels between Lucretius and Ovid reach their limit in the concept of “love” at issue. In his references to Venus, Lucretius is levying a Romanized version of Empedocles’s philia, a distinctly nonsexual principle of love and friendship (contrasted here with the more “lustful” Mars). Ovid, however, recuperates erotic desire by attributing it to Venus and making it a common ground for reconciliation.

Lucretius’s strong endorsement of marriage and procreation marks a significant break with Epicurus, who famously cautioned against both. While these departures could be regarded as evidence that Lucretius wished to reconcile Epicureanism with the conservative sexual ethics of Rome (Brown 1987, 122–127), Lucretius’s support for traditional family values is also theoretically driven: erotic desire, on his view, is so intractable that cultural values and social institutions connected with monogamy are crucial to suppressing its full potency. Ovid, however, sees things differently. If “all peace is in that one thing,”—that is, sex, then social order finds its nourishment in the cracks and margins of respectable association.

This link between social order and erotic desire finds vivid expression in Book 1 of Ars, in which Ovid compares the “fashionable ladies” of Rome to ants and bees. Just as these creaturely emblems of sociability spend their days industriously collecting nourishment from all corners of nature’s garden, Ovid reports, debaucherous women swarm the city’s auditoriums in search of new lovers to delight them:

hunt for [new lovers], especially, at the tiered theater:

that place is the most fruitful for your needs.

There you’ll find one to love, or one you can play with,

one to be with just once, or one you might wish to keep.

As ants return home often in long processions,

carrying their favorite food in their mouths,

or as the bees buzz through the flowers and thyme,

among their pastures and fragrant chosen meadows,

so our fashionable ladies crowd to the famous shows. . .

(Ovid 2001, 1.89–97)

This passage refers to the corruption of Roman sexual morals, and particularly those regulating the sexual behavior of women (pudor/pudicitia). ¹⁰ But Ovid’s analogizing of its effects with the spontaneous activities of bees and ants, models of social cooperation and natural order, suggests there is much to value in Rome’s supposed moral decline. While Augustan Rome was not a bastion of feminine respectability, it had produced its own version of a peaceable, stable, and mutually beneficial society.

Ovid’s naturalistic imagery is also distinctively Epicurean, recalling the honeybee analogy that dominates Lucretius’s ode to Epicurus in Book 3 of DRN (“from your sacred page, / as bees in meadows taste of every flower, / we likewise feed on all your Golden words” [Lucretius 1977, 3.10–12]). These parallels continue in Ovid’s turn to the darker pastures of Roman historical myth. In language reminiscent of the idyllic Epicurean garden scene in Book 2 of DRN, where men are said to “lie on soft turf side by side / under a tall tree’s branches near a stream / . . . easily, pleasantly, car[ing] for creature needs” (Lucretius 1977, 2.29–31), Ovid describes the primitive theater in which Romulus was soon to launch the rape of the Sabine women: “Then what the shady Palatine provided, leaves / simply placed, was all the artless scene: / The audience sat on tiers made from turf, / and covered their shaggy hair, as best they could, with leaves” (2001, 1.105–108). Apart from the playful suggestion that adultery is an ancient Roman custom, Ovid’s recollection of this formative episode in Roman history is meant to underscore his argument that social order finds its roots in the violation of sexual mores. From its very beginning, Ovid points out, the basic contours of Roman society have originated in sexual transgression. The idea that social order depends on strong norms of sexual propriety is the true fantasy, he suggests, and one that no Epicurean—and certainly no Roman!—should believe.

Moreover, Ovid uses the rape of the Sabine women to reinterpret sexual virtue itself. To those who shame the easy virtue of the “fashionable ladies” swarming theaters during the imperial era, Ovid offers this portrait of women committed to the defense of their pudor—asking, implicitly, which is really to be preferred:

As doves flee the eagle, in a frightened [timidissima] crowd,

as the new-born lamb runs from the hostile wolf:

so they fled in panic [timuere] from the lawless men,

and not one showed the color she had before.

Now they all fear [timor] as one, but not with one face of fear [timoris]:

Some tear their hair: some sit there, all will lost:

one mourns silently, another cries for her mother in vain:

one moans, one faints: one stays, while that one runs:

the captive girls were led away, a joyful prize,

and many made even fear [timor] itself look fitting.

(Ovid 2001, 1.117–126)

Against the backdrop of the poem’s overall thematization of Epicurean philosophy, in which fear is the primary obstacle to happiness, Ovid’s insistent repetition of the word timor suggests it is shame and modesty that ought to be regarded as backward, even corrupting, ethical traits.

Again, we find Ovid turning Lucretius against himself. Whereas Lucretius urges the strict discipline of sexual energy lest it become a source of pain, Ovid holds that it is precisely the attempt to discipline sexual energy that introduces physical and emotional turmoil. Tightly controlled systems of sexual honor obliterate the natural connection between sex and pleasure, transforming these impulses into sources of disturbance. The terror felt by the Sabine women is but a magnified version of the anxiety that suffuses life—and especially a woman’s life—when it is governed by strict rules of sexual propriety. Thus, according to Ovid, ataraxia requires that we cure ourselves of repressive sexual beliefs and practices, not erotic desire itself.

Mandragola plays with these Ovidian inversions of Lucretius. At the beginning of the play, Lucrezia is characterized as a paragon of womanly virtue. Callimaco describes her as chaste and “in all ways alien to the things of love,” while her figuration as a modern Lucretia suggests a particularly Roman sense of sexual decency and shame (Machiavelli 1981, 1.1). ¹¹ Lucrezia’s old-fashioned virtues set her apart from society and put her at odds with herself (Machiavelli 1981, 1.1, 2.6, 3.2). They also block her ability to gather the honey of new opportunities and resources that might, if embraced, help to satisfy her deepest longings. Ultimately, however, Lucrezia converts from one sexual ethic to another. Although she attributes her transformation to the corrupting influence of the people around her, the parallel with Roman-Lucretia suggests that Lucrezia has dealt herself the fatal blow. Like her Roman counterpart, Lucretia-Lucrezia dies by suicide, manifesting the death drive that underlies all efforts to nullify erotic instinct, and her passing brings to life a new regime in which these impulses circulate more freely and find readier satisfaction. Lucrezia is cured of repressive sexual beliefs and practices, and she is “reborn” as an Epicurean in Ovidian dress. ¹²

The release of sexual energy in the final scenes of Mandragola precipitates the emergence of a new and more stable domestic order, in which various forms of anxiety, frustration, and strife are replaced by the peace and reconciliation promised in Ars. In this way, Machiavelli makes good on the promise contained in the play’s frontispiece. In addition to the many references considered in the previous section, Mandragola’s Chiron image recalls Ovid’s self-description in the opening lines of Ars. Here, Ovid explicitly identifies himself with Chiron and compares his teachings about love with Chiron’s musical education of Achilles:

Chiron made the young Achilles perfect at the lyre,

and tempered his wild spirits through peaceful art.

[. . . .]

I am Love’s teacher as Chiron was Achilles’s,

both wild boys, both children of a goddess.

(Ovid 2001, 1.11–18)

But Ovid’s influence on Mandragola is felt in another way, too. As the organizing agent behind the founding of this new order, Lucrezia enacts a different understanding of “virtue,” which Machiavelli would have encountered in Ovid’s poetry: the mastery of erotic appearance.

There is perhaps no theme more central to Ovidian elegiacs than illusion, a phenomenon that Ovid addresses topically in all his love poems at the same time as he explores its special relationship with poetry through his own literary craftsmanship (Hardie 2002). Throughout Ars, Ovid treats illusion as vital to the experience and augmentation of erotic pleasure, and his discussion of the erotic arts of women in Book III revolves around various projects of erotic self-fashioning. Women are advised to use makeup, hairstyles, clothing, facial expressions, and bodily postures to make themselves seem more beautiful than they really are (Ovid 2001, 3.135–168, 3.185–188, 3.199–250, 3.261–280, 3.769–808). Carefully staged moans, protestations, and tears should be used to make it seem that women are more enamored by their lovers than they really are, thereby plumping their confidence and commanding their pity (Ovid 2001, 3.673–686). Even the painful and distressing illusions most feared by Lucretius are recognized by Ovid as having a role to play in stimulating pleasure: women should occasionally feign disinterest and rejection since “[w]hat’s easily given nourishes love poorly” and “bitterness renews our taste,” as do the jealousy and dread aroused when women pretend to have multiple lovers (Ovid 2001, 3.579, 3.583).

In Mandragola, Lucrezia responds to Ovid’s call to erotic arms: “Adhere to my religion, and deceive!” (Ovid 2001, 3.616). Under pressure from all sides, she discards her chaste modesty and takes up Ovid’s model of womanly virtue instead, displaying a newfound virtuosity in the art of erotic appearance. While Act 5 opens, significantly, with Timoteo complaining to himself that “devotion is lacking” because the frati have lost interest in tending the images that stimulate it, it closes with Lucrezia herself orchestrating multiple streams of erotic desire through the legislation and management of countervailing illusions.

Princely Virtù as Erotic Performance

Ligurio’s observation early in Mandragola that Lucrezia is “fit to govern a kingdom” invites audiences to regard her as a model of princely virtù as described in The Prince. But what exactly does she exemplify? Mandragola’s complex intertextual dialogue with Lucretius and Ovid brings into focus Machiavelli’s sense that effective statecraft involves the artful handling of illusion and especially fantasies about princely power itself. In a world of contending erotic desires, leaders must perform what is imagined to be true about them, even as they are really something else. Like Lucrezia, they must follow the lead of Ovid’s seductresses in crafting spectacles of themselves.

In chapter 15 of The Prince, Machiavelli describes himself as attending to political reality as opposed to what is imagined about it. But the reality he exposes and urges princes to confront as necessity is a world rife with illusion. It is a primarily “seen” world, in which “[m]en in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands” and “[e]veryone sees how you appear, [while] few touch what you are” (Machiavelli 1998, 71). In this respect Machiavelli proves to be a diligent student of Lucretius, who depicts our access to the natural world in primarily scopic terms—as material available to us in the form of visual images, or simulacra. Machiavelli also finds value in Lucretius’s treatment of these images as creations of an erotic imagination. While simulacra may originate in an external object, Lucretius says, they are largely mental projections that owe their shape and color to the active operation of a spectator’s own mind. This includes remaking objects into potential sources of erotic satisfaction, which, given the limitlessness of erotic desire, always involves a kind of fantasizing. Machiavelli characterizes the prince himself in these terms, as both a subject of representation to political audiences and a target of imaginative processing. Tyrant or savior, champion or adversary, a prince is whoever his subjects determine him to be, given their own insatiable desires for freedom or domination (Machiavelli 1998, 39).

But Machiavelli rejects Lucretius’s suggested response to this condition. Whereas Lucretius advises withdrawing from the world of simulacra as a way of protecting rational clarity and limiting exposure to psychic pain, Machiavelli treats this recommendation as the true fantasy. Princes must instead learn the hard lesson taught to Lucrezia in Mandragola: that it is impossible to escape the play of erotic forces. Security cannot be won through a ‘virtuousness’ of erotic renunciation, Lucretian or otherwise.

Initially, Lucrezia suspiciously guards herself against being pulled into the machinations of those around her, all of whom regard her as a fantasy object to be exploited for their own satisfaction. But the experience of being raped (with the complicity of everyone responsible for protecting her!) destroys this hope, forcing Lucrezia to realize that no amount of vigilant self-discipline is enough to keep her safe. She must adopt a different style of virtue instead, one that engages the simulacra that so worry Lucretius—and it is here that Ovid steps in. In Ars, Ovid teaches women how to navigate this world of unreality and exercise agency in a terrain defined by the male erotic imagination. Ovid’s cunning coquettes govern the male gaze by strategically refashioning themselves into objects of erotic longing, entrapping and controlling men with their own wishful thinking. Lucrezia practices a version of this virtù in the closing scenes of Mandragola, in which she miraculously appears to have become the woman whom everyone desires her to be—dutiful wife, impassioned lover, liberal benefactress, fertile mother—and thereby manages, finally, to have her say. So too with Machiavelli’s prince in The Prince. Far from bidding princes to renounce the swirl of appearances that populate the political world, as Lucretius would advise, Machiavelli urges his reader to “observe” them in the double sense of seeing and fulfilling them.

In this way, Mandragola deepens Machiavelli’s exploration of politics as “the sphere of spectacle” (Smith 2016, 29). Machiavelli’s examples of spectacular violence in The Prince and the Discourses on Livy are well-known and dovetail nicely with interpretations of his thought that emphasize its masculine aspects. Mandragola, however, genders statecraft as a feminine pursuit: one in which leaders, like women, must craft spectacles of themselves and manage their self-display in order to captivate the attention of erotically driven audiences and convert their objectification into agency. Like Lucrezia, who eventually mimes the “stupif[ying]” fantasy image proffered to Callimaco in Paris, leaders must perform who they are imagined to be as a way of dazzling and subduing their unruly subjects. Ultimately, however, they must surpass the example set by Ovid’s flirts by satisfying multiple audiences at once, coordinating the contending erotic impulses of different constituencies. For Machiavelli, this is what it means to make the erotic arts political.

Conclusion

Machiavelli expects audiences to be puzzled by Mandragola. Why would someone as “wise and grave” as Machiavelli bother with something as “light” as a Renaissance rom-com? While Machiavelli’s answer to this query is dismissive of the play’s content (“he is trying / with these vain thoughts / to make his wretched time more pleasant”), closer examination reveals a studied engagement with ideas and arguments central to Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Almost thirty years after transcribing DRN, Machiavelli was still meditating on its theoretical import—and carving out a decidedly mixed position toward it. On the one hand, Mandragola reveals Machiavelli to be comfortable with Lucretius’s focus on pleasure seeking and his attention to the fact that living pleasantly is often harder than it seems. On the other, it shows him resisting Lucretian alarm concerning fantasy and illusion, using the play’s nested schemes of sexual duplicity to recommend a more relaxed posture toward false belief. Instead of treating happiness as an effect of unpolluted rationality, Machiavelli allows for a more constructive relationship between pleasure and illusion: one in which “virtue” amounts to a kind of seductive skill, whereby the imagination is stimulated in such a way as to maintain pleasure’s edge.

Machiavelli gleans these insights from Ars amatoria and conveys them in the guise of an elaborate bed trick involving a mysterious and evolving character named Lucrezia. In its shrewd use of classical source materials, Mandragola performs its own literary bed trick, in which audiences are seduced by Lucretian imagery and verses, only to find themselves between the sheets with Ovid. But Machiavelli also thinks beyond his classical sources, for not even Ovid imagined scaling the “art of love” into a political art, as Machiavelli does when he envisions the pleasures of an entire community being ruled by Lucrezia. Fulfilling Ligurio’s early description of her as “fit to govern a kingdom,” Lucrezia gives civic expression to Ovidian virtue by ordering the competing erotic desires of her household for the common benefit. At last, under her watchful eye, everyone is finally gratified.