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Ancients and Moderns under the Empire of Circe: Machiavelli’s The Ass, Commentary2 8 1gambits, poetic conceits, and forms of verse from these works of his predecessors,but above all the themes and problems they are devoted to articulating.As Apuleius’s Metamorphoses takes up the issue of the decline and translationof ancient philosophy into a novel religious sect; 3 as Plutarch’s AnimalsAre Rational examines the question of the necessary preconditions for thepossibility of mind in human life or the necessary relation between humandefectiveness and human rationality; 4 and as Dante’s Comedy assigns itselfthe task of recovering and restoring philosophy in the wake of its absorptionby Christian theology 5 —so Machiavelli, as we shall see, takes up withinthis single work each of these themes in turn according to the order of hisargument.In addition, following Dante’s lead, Machiavelli has built the issue of hisrelation to ancient wisdom not only into the argument, but into the drama ofThe Ass by portraying himself in the figure of the hero of the poem, lost in aharsh and obscure wood at its opening, and ancient wisdom in the figure of abeautiful woman who effects his salvation from this predicament. 6 Somewhatto our surprise, since it is contrary to what we have been led to expect fromMachiavelli’s other, more famous writings, that relation is depicted as a loveaffair. If we wish to gain a full understanding of Machiavelli’s debt to anddeparture from the philosophical tradition that preceded him, it behooves usto turn our attention to this work in which that debt and departure are madethematic as in none of Machiavelli’s other writings. 73Seth Benardete, The Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Reading of Ancient Poetry and Philosophy(South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2012), 305–11.4Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 12, trans. H. Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1957), 986c–e, 991e–992a5Steven Berg, “An Introduction to the Reading of Dante,” Interpretation 35, no. 2 (2008): 123–52.6As Machiavelli’s references in The Ass to Apuleius, Plutarch, and Dante suggest, and as the argumentof this paper will attempt to demonstrate, the tradition of ancient philosophy with whichMachiavelli is here concerned is that of Socratic political philosophy. That Machiavelli was familiarthrough his reading of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things with an alternative “tradition” of ancientwisdom, namely, Epicureanism, is well known. It must be observed, however, that Lucretius both lacksa political philosophy properly speaking—he offers no teaching on the question of the best regime—and dismisses the problem of natural teleology: according to Lucretius nature is devoid of any and allfinal causality (On the Nature of Things 2.167–82, 4.823–57, 5.195–227, 837–77). Now the question ofthe best regime simply and that of the best practicable regime are issues that Machiavelli addressesprominently in his confrontation with the ancients, as the quotation from chapter 15 of the Princeoffered above indicates. Moreover, as the arguments of this paper will show, the problem of naturalteleology or of the good as a principle operative in the nature of things is an issue central to Machiavelli’sreflections here in The Ass regarding the ancients and his relation to them. One must conclude,therefore, that the Epicurean tradition is not represented here in The Ass and that Machiavelli is notconcerned in this work to clarify his relation to that tradition.7An insurmountable obstacle, however, might be thought to stand in the way of such an effort—the