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Ancients and Moderns under the Empire of Circe: Machiavelli’s The Ass, Commentary2 9 7“handmaiden” to its “divine science.” Yet the beautiful woman suggests thatsuch necessary evils are necessary also and above all to preserve the goodof man. Philosophy cannot rule in the cities because the element in whichphilosophy is alive is doubt and inquiry; while the city lives of necessity inthe element of opinion. Only opinion or compulsion, therefore, can exercisepolitical rule. The cave cannot be made to ascend into the light of the sun. Thefoundation of this impossibility, however, is the inalterable double nature ofman: “walkers” and “runners.” No persuasion or force is powerful enough totransform a nonphilosopher into a philosopher. But this is all to the advantageof philosophy insofar as the very possibility of philosophy is premisedupon the permanence of the distinction between belief and opinion, on onehand, and doubt and truth, on the other. 35 The same inalterable conditionsthat make the elimination of evil from the cities of men impossible renderpossible the existence of philosophy. The current climate may obscure, butit cannot abolish those conditions, and those conditions must, in the courseof the revolutions of the political lives of men, come to the fore again. 36 Thetheocracy ingredient in the orders of Christian politics cannot help butweaken those same orders and lead inevitably to their decline. In the wakeof that decline one can anticipate a return to sounder, more “natural” politicalorders. In the meantime the present and temporary (and also future orpermanent) evils of political life require that the hero and all who are of hiskind adopt a prudential esotericism in the conduct of their inquiries and theexpression of their thought.The beautiful woman has presented us with something like a teleologicalaccount of the nature of things and human affairs. It is a teleological accountin which chance and necessity are granted a genuine and independentexistence and real evils prove to be that without which the good would beunavailable. This is the view concerning the good that Machiavelli attributesto ancient philosophy. 37 That Machiavelli’s hero himself seems to endorse this35Moreover, the erotic and therefore private character of philosophy—made visible in the love affairbetween the hero and the beautiful woman—makes its translation into a public and spirited enterpriseimpossible. As we shall see, it is not philosophy that is made to “go public” through Machiavelli’s novelstrategy, but a new science of politics and morality; and that science, like all science, is on a non- orsubphilosophical level.36Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, and Bonaventure, On the Eternity of the World, trans. Vollert, Kendzierski,and Byrne (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1964), 93; Aristotle, On Generation andCorruption 337b25–338b20; Plato, Laws 676b–c.37Plato, Timaeus 47e–48a, 51d–53c; Theaetetus 176a; Aristotle, Physics 2.9. See Seth Benardete, TheArgument of the Action: Essays in Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2000), 381–82; John M. Cooper, “Hypothetical Necessity and Natural Teleology,” in PhilosophicalIssues in Aristotle’s Biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University