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

20
Chapter 2. Intellectual context
him the critique of Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590), ‘the most fervent
Dutch champion of religious toleration of the Revolt period’. 61
Besides Lipsius’s view on religious persecution, another controversial
aspect of the Politica was his concept of ‘mixed prudence’ (prudentia mixta).
By mixed prudence Lipsius meant the mixing of prudence and deceit. Lipsius
allowed the prince to make use of deceptive techniques like dissimulation
and bribery ‘so long it is done moderately and with good aims’. In the evil
times Lipsius thought he and his contemporaries were living in, the prince
had to know when to put on the skin of the lion and when that of the fox. 62
The importance Oestreich attributed to the Neostoic element in Lipsius’s
Politica has been refuted. Instead, the Politica has been identified as a ‘work
predominantly Tacitist or Machiavellian in nature’, a work of which ‘Tacitus
is the most important source’. 63 Lipsius’s use of and admiration for Tacitus
– he called the Roman historian a ‘sharp’ and ‘sagacious’ writer 64 – can be
put in a broader perspective, that of the rise of a current in early modern
political thought and literature that modern day scholars call ‘Tacitism’. In a
recent short survey dealing with Tacitism, Tacitism has been described as ‘a
complex, even protean phenomenon’, of which the roots go back to the fifteenth
century. 65 At that time, interest in Tacitus was still marginal. During the
fifteenth and a large part of the sixteenth century, Cicero and Livy outshone
Tacitus in popularity; they were the models to follow, both in literary style
and, at least in the case of Cicero, also in political morality. 66
Tacitus’s real breakthrough occured ‘in the later sixteenth century, when
Tacitus enjoyed an overwhelming and unprecedented popularity’. 67 In the
61 Van Gelderen, “The Low Countries”, pp. 393-94, with quote on the latter. The description of
Coornhert is taken from Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806
(Clarendon Press; Oxford, 1 st ed. 1995, 1998), p. 98.
62 Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, pp. 48-49, and Lipsius, Politica, IV.13-14, pp.
506-33, with quote on p. 509.
63 See the introduction by Jan Waszink to Lipsius’s Politica, pp. 12-14, 93-102, 108-10, 148-55, 163,
with quotes on p. 12 and p. 98.
64 In the dedication of his 1574 edition of Tacitus’s works. See Jan Waszink, “Your Tacitism or Mine?
Modern and Early-Modern Conceptions of Tacitus and Tacitism”, in History of European Ideas, Vol. 36
(2010), p. 376.
65 See the entry “Tacitus and Tacitism”, in Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis
(eds.), The Classical Tradition (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Cambridge/London, 2010),
pp. 920-24, with quote on p. 920. If I would have to give a short description of early modern ‘Tacitism’, I
would describe it as a preference for, and use of, the style and content of the works of Tacitus in Europe
during the early modern period.
66 See Waszink, “Your Tacitism or Mine?”, p. 375.
67 Alexandra Gajda, “Tacitus and Political Thought in Early Modern Europe, c. 1530-c. 1640”, in
A.J. Woodman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge,
2009), p. 253.