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Ancients and Moderns under the Empire of Circe: Machiavelli’s The Ass, Commentary2 9 5The hero’s happiness is, however, qualified at the moment by the difficultiesin which he has found himself. The evil of the dark wood in whichhe encountered the beautiful woman, and the good of her beautiful face,between them render him “now sorrowful, now happy” (III.64). He wouldprefer to have the good without its accompanying evil so that his happinessmight be unalloyed. In this he resembles all men who, in their preference forthe good, believe it would be to their ultimate advantage to enjoy this good inthe absence of any evil whatsoever. This belief displays their assumption thatgood and evil are essentially disjoined and their being together an accidentalconjunction.The hero surrenders himself into the arms of the beautiful woman, tosuch an extent as to appear to wish to acquire his knowledge of himselfexclusively from her reports. He wishes her to do him the courtesy of tellinghim the “course of my life that you know” (III.73–75). In complying withhis request, the beautiful woman corrects him in regard to his assumptionsconcerning the relation between good and evil: they are not disjoined as heassumes, but related in a nonarbitrary way. The ground of their necessaryrelation appears, by her account, to be the disposition of the heavens and theheavenly bodies: behind her teaching about the good lies an implicit cosmologyor at least an account of the nature of things.She begins by insisting on the unparalleled character of the ingratitudewith which our hero has been met. He has been subjected to a similarlyunprecedented quantity of “difficulty” (fatica). None of this, however, andespecially not his having been led into this “ferocious and strong” place,may be attributed to any error on his part. It was rather, in the beautifulwoman’s estimation, chance or fate (sorte) that was opposed to his “goodwork” (III.76–81). If the hero is the lover of (ancient) wisdom or the philosopher,wisdom herself tells him that the philosopher and philosophy havefallen under the empire of Circe through no fault of their own. It is merelychance that philosophy should be subjected to such savage hardship. Thissubjection, however, ought not to be a cause of lamentation. One need onlyobserve the heavens and the heavenly bodies in their constant, restless wandering,“now high, now low,” and a similar restlessness visible both in thesky, sometimes shadowed, sometimes “lucid and clear,” and on the earth,where nothing maintains a constant condition, to know that human affairsmust reflect the perpetual revolutions of nature, where motion necessarilyUniversity of Chicago Press, 1998), 107–11.