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Ancients and Moderns under the Empire of Circe: Machiavelli’s The Ass, Commentary3 0 3That the hero counts even the beautiful woman’s serpentine teachingregarding good and evil as a portion of her “angelic beauties” and that thisteaching itself renders him forgetful of human things raises the suspicionthat Machiavelli considers this teaching about the good to be too good to betrue and, therefore, a teaching not about the good, but rather the apparentgood, or the beautiful. The idealism of ancient philosophy permeates it to itscore. Our suspicion is confirmed when the hero is left to his own thoughts forthe time during which the beautiful woman must attend to her herd at Circe’sbehest. He is like “one who is suspicious of various things, and confuses himself,desiring the good that he does not anticipate” (V.25–27).The hero begins to doubt that portion of the beautiful woman’s accountaccording to which one may rely upon chance and necessity to produce a situationin which the good is made effectively available. Yet the general thrustof the hero’s solitary reflections seems to confirm rather than contradict hisbeloved’s declarations regarding the revolutions of the natural bodies andhuman affairs. The author-hero claims that he considered past things and“ancient peoples” and their fortunes (V.28–33). Nevertheless, though hecertainly mentions Sparta and Athens, he also takes note of the fortunes of contemporaryVenice and the German states (V.49–63). He calls these reflectionsa “discourse” (V.31) and discussions of all these cities figure in Machiavelli’sDiscourses on Livy alongside the manifest topic of that work—the characterand history of Rome and her empire. The hero, however, in a remarkableomission, seems never to refer to Rome, her history, or her empire. Instead, onthe basis of the fortunes of the cities he does consider, he develops an accountthat seems to be a restatement of the beautiful woman’s position and a confirmationof Machiavelli’s suggestion at the beginning of the Discourses thatthere is a perpetually recurring cycle of regimes (V.94–105). That such a cycleis necessary must remain undemonstrated, however, given the short life ofany one city, and in any case revolutions of regimes can be arrested, it wouldappear, by the establishment of a mixed regime through the agency of eitherprudence or chance or both. Rome was one such mixed regime. 49Though unnamed by the hero, Rome is implicitly present in his discoursewhen he acknowledges that a “realm that is driven by virtue or by necessityto act, will always see itself go upward” (V.79–81). Rome, by Machiavelli’saccount in the Discourses, was a regime propelled by both virtue and necessityon such a continual ascent. Rome is the exception that disproves the49Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.2