Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli’s Mandragola

• Author: Michelle T. Clarke
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221095859
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221095859

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(6) 913 –938

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221095859

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Article

Curing Virtue:

Epicureanism and Erotic

Fantasy in Machiavelli’s

Mandragola

Michelle T. Clarke1

Abstract

Who is Lucrezia, the mysterious woman at the center of Machiavelli’s comic

play Mandragola? And why is she deemed “fit to govern a kingdom”? This

article revisits these questions with attention to Mandragola’s sophisticated,

and often irreverent, allusions to Roman source materials. While scholars

have long recognized that Mandragola draws on Roman history and drama,

its sustained engagement with Lucretian and Ovidian poetry has gone largely

unnoticed. In what follows, I trace these allusions and show how Machiavelli

uses them to bring into view the fertility of erotic desire. Mandragola is

replete with Lucretian phrases and imagery, but a close examination of

these references indicates they are made playfully, and even satirically, in

the style of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, a didactic elegy on the art of seduction that

develops a mixed assessment of Epicurean teachings. Like Ovid, Machiavelli

embraces the hedonism that motivates Epicureanism—but without

accepting that happiness requires distancing ourselves from illusion. This

departure allows both Ovid and Machiavelli to reassess the status of erotic

desire. For Lucretius, erotic desire must be handled with extreme caution

lest it entangle the mind in ruinous false beliefs and destroy the possibility

of theoretical wisdom. Machiavelli, following Ovid, recommends a different

1Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michelle T. Clarke, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, HB 6108, Silsby

Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.

Email: Michelle.t.clarke@dartmouth.edu

1095859PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221095859Political TheoryClarke

research-article2022

914 Political Theory 50(6)

course, in which happiness is achieved through the deliberate manipulation

of erotic fantasy. For Machiavelli, staging erotic fantasies is an essential part

of statecraft.

Keywords

Machiavelli, Lucretius, Epicureanism, Ovid, erotic, virtue

Machiavelli’s La Mandragola (1524) remains one of the greatest examples of

commedia erudita produced in the sixteenth century. Like other plays in this

genre, it reworks a variety of classical source materials, most obviously the

comedies of Terence and Plautus. Scholars have long recognized the pres-

ence of other classical references in Mandragola too, including allusions to

Livy’s history of Rome. Indeed, the very name of its female protagonist,

Lucrezia, recalls Livy’s story of the rape of Lucretia, whose suicide catalyzed

the founding of the Roman Republic (Martinez 1983; Behuniak-Long 1989;

Matthes 2000; Winter 2019).

This article explores Mandragola’s complex allusions to Roman poetry,

which it uses to stage a conception of princely virtue organized around the

creation and manipulation of erotic appearances. On the one hand,

Mandragola uses medical imagery drawn from Lucretius’s De rerum natura

to suggest the curative power of Epicurean ideas about happiness. In this

vein, the play can be read as using the aptly named character of Lucrezia to

recommend a conversion from the ethic of duty associated with Lucretia, the

Roman matron, to the ethic of pleasure associated with Lucretius, the Roman

poet and philosopher.1

But Mandragola turns elsewhere for guidance about how to operational-

ize hedonism as a social and political principle. In place of Lucretius’s stern

intellectualism, which counsels the renunciation of impulses (like love) that

cannot be disentangled from false belief, Machiavelli embraces the more

relaxed and adventurous posture endorsed by Ovid in Ars amatoria.2 Ovid’s

1. An annotated and signed transcription of Lucretius’s De rerum natura in

Machiavelli’s hand was discovered in the Vatican Manuscript Library in the early

1960s (MS Vat. Rossi 884; see also Bertelli and Gaeta 1961; Bertelli 1964). On

Lucretius’s influence on Machiavelli, see Brown 2010; Rahe 2007; Roecklein 2012.

2. Eisner 2019 finds echoes of Ovid in The Prince.