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2 8 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3the fifteenth chapter of the Prince Machiavelli rejects the central concern ofall prior political philosophy when he insists on the useless character for “onewho understands” of the construction of “imagined republics.” Machiavellideclares that he will no longer take the best regime as such, or the regimein which virtue and wisdom rule, as his clue to uncovering the truth of thenature of the political, the nature of man, and the nature of things simply.It was this shifting of attention from “that which ought to be done” to “thatwhich is done,” in the interest of preserving oneself and avoiding ruin, thatmarked the initial break with the tradition and set the course of philosophicalthought on a new trajectory.This new trajectory, however, as directed above all to uncovering “effectualtruths,” required the renovation not simply of philosophy, but of the politicaland religious orders of mankind. Philosophy became, for the first time, beneficentnot only in itself, but in the practical effects that were designed to issuefrom it. Philosophy took upon its shoulders responsibility for the well-beingof ordinary men. Since no philosopher prior to Machiavelli ever aspired toassume such a burden, and virtually all those who follow in his wake seemnever to have considered casting it off, 2 we are tempted to conclude that theterms “philosophy” and “political philosophy” are equivocal when applied toboth ancient and modern thought. And we are hardly surprised by the paucityof references within Machiavelli’s works to Plato and Aristotle, whose thoughthad dominated the scene for nearly two thousand years when Machiavellifirst put pen to paper. Machiavelli and his progeny seem to part companydecisively with these thinkers and, therefore, also with the tradition to whichtheir thought gave rise, a tradition stretching from Plutarch and Apuleius toAquinas and Dante.It must be of some interest to scholars whose attention is drawn to theissue of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, then, that Machiavellihas left behind a writing which, on the very face of it, acknowledgesa heavy debt to three of the foremost authors of the Platonic-Aristoteliantradition named above. The Ass is a work that clearly announces its literaryantecedents: Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass, as it has cometo be called), Plutarch’s Animals Are Rational, and, above all, Dante’s Comedy.In his composition of The Ass, Machiavelli borrows not simply narrative2Hobbes, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mendelssohn,Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, despite the many significant differences dividingthem, all agree on the proposition that philosophy must assume a “humanitarian” or altruistic characterin the sense of providing for the well-being and advancement of all men on the material, moral,and political planes.