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2 9 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3can no longer put heart and soul into political action. Even the greatest ofpolitical men now at least doubt whether it is not really the case that a transpoliticalgood is the real and highest good. Men have been “depoliticized” toa degree that would have appeared incredible to the eyes of the ancients. 26 Itis this depoliticization that Machiavelli portrays as the bestialization of manat the hands of Circe: if in the case of the “universality” it is man’s politicalcharacter that distinguishes him, the loss of that character is the loss of whatis distinctively human. The promise of glory before god leads to the ingloriousdecay of man into a weak and disordered beast.The weak and disordered state of “human” affairs has been all to theadvantage of death and his companions: only where the civil principate isinfirm can the power of the ecclesiastical principate extend its sway. Theabsence of men of sufficient prudence and spiritedness to build politicalstructures on solid foundations has allowed Circe and her legions to exerciseunprecedented influence over the things of the world they pretend to despise.Their rule is preeminent. Their rule, however, is misrule or nonrule—it isanarchy. Theocracy, having denuded political life of political virtue, has madethe world almost entirely subject to the variability of chance or fortune. 27In fine: Circe’s flattening of the high points of the political terrain, thatis, the defanging and declawing of the “lions” of political life, has made it difficultif not impossible to determine, from an inspection of the contemporarylandscape, the range of possibilities ingredient in human nature as far as it isexpressed on the political plane. Men have been debased and homogenized tosuch a degree that certain “elevated” human possibilities have been renderedinvisible. Men such as Romulus, Theseus, Cyrus, Junius Brutus, Alcibiades,Epaminondas, Philopoemen, Camillus, Cincinnatus, Fabius, Hannibal, andAlexander can no longer arise and flourish given the impoverished characterof the modern terrain. Ancient wisdom, therefore, has become the sole sourceavailable for making manifest the full range of the possibilities available tohuman nature. 28 Yet the very leveling of the terrain that makes recourse toancient wisdom indispensible makes the survival of ancient wisdom doubt-26Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (New York: LexingtonBooks, 2004), 69; Leo Strauss Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University of Washington Press,1958), 118.27Machiavelli, Discourses, 2.30.5.28Only such works as Livy’s history and Xenophon’s Anabasis make plain the capacities that maydevelop and exercise themselves upon a political scene uncorrupted by the “modern education.”