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Ancients and Moderns under the Empire of Circe: Machiavelli’s The Ass, Commentary2 9 1of a particular sort in that it is necessarily accompanied by the emasculationeffected by the spouses of death. What this means can be illustrated mostconveniently by an appeal to the example of those “beasts” that the beautifulwoman tends as her particular herd: “bears, wolves and proud and beastlylions…with many other wild animals” (II.58–60). We learn later what, forexample, we are to understand by “lions”: they are those men possessed of aheart “great-souled and courtly” (VI.55). Very few of such “high-class” politicalmen are to be found in contemporary civic life and those few who remainare diminished and domesticated. 23 There are no contemporary equivalentsof Alcibiades, Alexander, or Caesar. Through her “proper virtue,” “given toher by heaven” (II.139)—that is, through her teachings and doctrines regardingvirtue as transmitted by the spouses of death—Circe has bestialized andtamed such men. Christianity has successfully proposed a novel understandingof good and evil, according to which magnanimity or pride is not thecrown of the virtues but the fundament of all vice, and this-worldly glory,which the prideful pursue, the path not to apotheosis but to perdition. Theonly glory worthy of acquisition is glory before god and the only road tosuch glory, humility. 24 The exclusive emphasis on otherworldly glory in anascent to the transhuman and supernatural has effected the denigration ofthis-worldly glory and a reassessment of its quality—it is subhuman, bestialrapacity. Apotheosis has been democratized and thereby detached from thepolitical grandeur (good or evil or both) that once alone secured it. Thosewho now continue to pursue glory in this life in the climate of the empire ofCirce do so with a bad conscience that renders them ultimately feeble andsubject to the authority of the priesthood. 25 Political life and the conduct ofpolitical life have been utterly transformed by being entirely discredited. Men23They lick the feet of the hero in pity and regret over his fate, which they assume to be similar totheir own (II.130–35).24Machiavelli, Discourses, 2.2.2. If one wishes to be exalted to the heights of the divine nature onemust be numbered among the lowest of the low, the meek and poor of spirit.25Machiavelli, Discourses, 2.2; Cesare Borgia, who fancied himself capable of acquiring a principateby means of his own arms and his own virtue, could in fact never perceive his complete dependencyupon his father (who happened to be the father of the church as well), let alone think of the properremedy that might rid him of such dependency (Prince, chap. 7). Giovampogolo, “who did not mindbeing incestuous and a public parricide,” through his “cowardice” allowed Pope Julius, unarmed andvirtually alone, to arrest him while surrounded by his men-at-arms and without putting up the leastbit of resistance, let alone dealing with Julius and the college of cardinals as a man who possessedgreatness of soul and knowledge of how to be “honorably wicked or perfectly good,” and so securehimself “perpetual fame,” must have dealt with them (Discourses, 1.27). The empire over men’s mindsthat the “ecclesiastical principality” exercises is so complete that “these states, although undefended,are never taken away and the subjects, although ungoverned, never care—they never think of alienatingthemselves from their princes, nor can they” (Prince, chap. 11).