historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 9. The working of politics. The Disquisitiones politicae
that what is now old was once new, and what is now new will in process of
time become old’. Yet, as Boxhorn concluded, despite all the possible merits
Descartes’s new philosophy might possess it would also, after having lasted
for a while, ‘in time grow old’.
The resemblance to what Boxhorn had said in the Disquisitiones politicae
about defending ancient laws just because they were old is evident. 80 In the
epitome of Descartes’s life we see the same logic that Boxhorn used to defend
the necessity of adapting to new circumstances applied to the realm of science
and ideas, which were just like the words that expressed them, the languages
that transferred them, and the customs that formed them likely to change as
time goes by and circumstances change. 81 As his motto in the Metamorphosis
Anglorum makes clear, ‘times change and we change with them’. 82 Boxhorn’s
historical and political works show that he believed this to be true for
all aspects of human life. Like Bodin, for example, Boxhorn denies that even
commonwealths will last forever.
323
Even to commonwealths thus organised and secured both at home
and abroad, it cannot be possible to ascribe to them a certain eternity.
So what remains is to end this first book [i.e. of the Institutiones politicae-JN]
with the end and finish which generally is to want to befall all
forms of command. It is indeed a characteristic of all human affairs,
by some eternal law, that all matters, even if they are organised and
secured in the best manner, eventually are changed or destroyed.
Likewise happens to commonwealths, of which some are changed
and others destroyed. 83
80 In both the epitome and the Disquisitiones politicae (XXXIX) Boxhorn alludes to the same passage
in Tacitus’s Annals (XI.24.7, quoted in footnote 68 above) to make his point.
81 This, however, not in a Pythagorasic cyclic way of movement. Boxhorn speaks here of a ‘new
way of Philosophizing’ in the sense that it was a way of philosophising that had not been conducted
before. For a nice example of how Boxhorn believed that circumstances influenced language, see his
letter to Pontanus and Scriverius of April 1632, in which he deplores the loss ‘of the splendor of the
Roman language’ after the loss of the res publica (a very Tacitean topic; see Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus).
‘Quò altius, Viri Clarissimi, in populi Romani historiam penetro, eò longius, à pristino felicitatis flore
illam terrarum, gentiumque Deam descivisse comperior. Nempe raro tam felicia gentibus fata sunt, ut
in eodem statu tranquiliae perdurent. Florentes populorum res fere cum singulis saeculis convertuntur.
Praeter enim infinita alia, quae quotidie experimur, naturales quaedam imperiorum conversiones sunt,
ut divinus Plato existimavit. Ex quo enim Bruti, Scipiones, Valerii, Marii, & praeclarae ejusmodi animae
in Republica Romana defuere, praestantia ingenia non illuxere. Semel dicam: cum re Romana etiam lingua
defecit, quae quo longo ab Augusti aevo decessit, eô magis splendorem amisit.’ Boxhorn, Epistolae
et poemata, pp. 21-22.
82 Boxhorn, Metamorphosis Anglorum, p. 274. ‘Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.’
83 Idem, Institutiones politicae, I.16.1, p. 251. ‘Rebuspublicis constitutis ita, & domi forisque confirmatis,
neque aeternitatem quandam liceat polliceri. Restat igitur, ut libro primo imponat finem finis &
exitus, qui fere omnium imperiorum esse consueverit. Equidem rerum omnium humanarum, aeterna
quadam lege, quaecunque, optimâ licet ratione instituta, & confirmata, tandem aut mutantur, aut ever-