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2 8 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3The poem opens with the author identifying himself with the protagonistof his work. “The various chances, the pain and sorrow which in the formof an ass I endured, I will sing, if Fortune is willing.” He ascribes his sufferingto chance and declares that even his ability to sing of these sufferings isin the hands of fortune. According to the beautiful woman who effects hissalvation, the cause of our hero’s having fallen into the dark wood and harshvalley is also chance or fortune; moreover, she identifies chance and fortunewith the disposition of the heavens; and the latter is said to be responsible forCirce’s power to “convert” men’s “forms,” that is, to bestialize them (III.79–86, 100–105; II.140). When our narrator declares that it is chance that hasmade the present “time so spiteful and sad” (I.97), he is then identifying thatevil for which chance may be held responsible with the empire of Circe overthe contemporary scene. The fact that chance or the heavens will also providethe preconditions for the coming to pass of a time of unprecedented happiness(III.106–11) indicates that, according to the beautiful woman, the samechance that has thrust Circe to prominence must return her to the exile fromwhich she was once recalled. Chance appears to exercise almost universalsway over the world and its vicissitudes.The operations of chance, however, are not purely random. The heavensthat are identified with chance are also identified with “the fates” (III.100–102, 106–11); and the beautiful woman’s assurance that Circe must one dayfall seems based upon this identity. Chance events occur within a frameworkof necessity that makes it possible to predict with certainty the fate of Circe’sempire (IV.39). On the other hand, as our hero declares in his solitary meditationsduring the course of chapter 5, virtue or necessity may insure that akingdom or empire “will always see itself go upward” (V.79–81). A man inpossession of virtue and acting in concert with necessity may prove the masterof chance or fortune. Both the rise and the fall of Circe indicate that suchvirtue as can exercise a mastery over chance is now lacking, and has been forsome time. It will be among the tasks that our hero takes upon his shouldersapparently fragmentary nature of the piece. As Allan Gilbert remarks, “evidently Machiavelli hadintentions not to be inferred from the fragment that he left” (Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others,ed. Gilbert [Durham: Duke University Press, 1989], 2:750). If The Ass has not in every respect beenbrought to a state of perfection—as the lacunae in chapter 7 indicate—it seems clear that it is nota mere fragment. That the poem’s conclusion at the end of chapter 8 is the conclusion Machiavelliintended can be inferred from the fact that both the figure of Circe, off-stage though dominant at theopening of the poem, and that of the “big, fat pig,” endowed with the gift of speech and offering anencomium in praise of the virtues of beasts and an invective against the vices of human beings at itsend, are characters drawn most proximately from Plutarch’s Animals Are Rational. Plutarch’s workends precisely where Machiavelli’s work ends: at the point where Plutarch’s talking pig, Gryllus, ceaseshis similar diatribe in condemnation of the viciousness of human life and celebration of the bestial.