Why History?

The final chapter of the soon to be released (soon as in glacially soon 2017) book Paying Melpomene’s Price: Miscalculated Risk in Tragedy will finish off with a bang. What sort of a bang? Well, sometimes the way to really define something is to define what it is not. In the last chapter will be a discussion of the differences between tragedy, philosophy, history, and comedy. This means I should start reading other genres! Well, it so happens that history is a close second favourite after tragedy. They are in fact quite related. You can get, for instance, tragic history like the Leonidas’ last stand. In a later blog I will disclose what my third and fourth favourite are. So there you have it, assiduous readers: this is the reason why I.m reading The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca by Machiavelli. There will be more histories, philosophies, and comedies to follow.

Why Machiavelli?

I.ve read (and enjoyed) Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Sallust, Caesar, and other ancient Greek and Roman historians. Thinking it.d be a good idea to branch out a bit for the purposes of Doing Melpomene’s Work, I went down to Russell Books to find something new. Boy do they have a big history section! It was overwhelming. The selection confounded me and I left without making a purchase. Stacks and stacks of WWII, WWI, early Canadian exploration, and so on. What is worse, the ones I looked at didn.t read like the ‘narrative’ type history that I was familiar with.

Later that afternoon, while meeting up with MT at Moka House (a well-heeled coffee shop for artists, students, on-duty police, and locals) on Cook street, who did I bump into but my (erstwhile) neighbour SG. SG happens to be a history professor at UVic, so he knows a thing or two about history. I asked him for some tips. He asked what I had read and then had three suggestions: Machiavelli, Ibn Khaldun, and Gibbon. Thanks for saving the day, SG!

Back to Russell Books

Next day, back to Russell Books. Believe it or not, they only had one copy of Machiavelli.s historical works there! It had the History of Florence (which was the recommendation) and also some other works, one of which among them is The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca. Normally, complete works are better. But seeing that this was all they had, well, beggars can.t be choosers! It was a bargain at $4.50 (well actually not so much since the original price was $1.45). No image on amazon or googleimages, here.s a snapshot:

The sparse looking cover is a welcome sight. I could imagine the stone lion guarding the bridges at Florence. It might even date back to Machiavelli.s time but on second thought maybe it.d be more weathered. It.s a sort of noble image that captures what the imagination anticipates in a Machiavelli history: noble, monolithic, distant, from another era.

[edit] There is a note on the front cover illustration inside the book:

Sculpted in sandstone by Donatello circa 1418, The Sitting Lion, also known as The Marzocco, is a Florentine emblem. Designed for a papal residence, this statue now reside in the Mseo Nazionale in Florence.

Back Blurb and ‘About the Author’

Since readers of the blog are becoming experts at analyzing back blurbs, here.s the one from this volume:

Machiavelli–whose name has become synonymous with the cynical, scheming, and immoral–was in truth an idealist with a cold, clear eye on reality. A passionate, courageous patriot, he would have spent his entire career in the active service of a free Florence. But upheavals of war ousted him after fourteen years. Yet his assertion that politics has inherent rules not necessarily related to morality, and his blunt aphorisms–so easily distorted out of context–account for his undeserved notoriety.

For Machiavelli, the historian played a significant pedagogic role. In Th Description of the Affairs of France and the Discourse on the Government of Florence, he viewed history with an eye to contemporary problems. The Life of Castruccio, a romanticized biography, illustrates his ideal of strength.

The major portion of this book is devoted to selections from The History of Florence. Here Machiavelli applied the criteria of success and failure developed in his earlier studies to evaluate his city’s past

Machiavelli was edited by Myron P. Gilmore, Professor of History at Harvard University.

Some thoughts. Wow, if you are a tenured professor at Harvard with an initialed middle name, you don.t need much of an ‘About the Author’ or in this case ‘About the Editor’! Just that you have three initials and work at Harvard suffices. Hmm, maybe I could be Edwin C. Wong. Or, not to be outdone, maybe I could use my Chinese middle name for even greater effect: Edwin C.L. Wong!

The back blurb in this volume gets the attention by dispelling conventions. It also has the advantage of being written from the point of view of someone who appreciates Machiavelli and wishes to recuperate his cold-blooded reputation. Whether Machiavelli was calculatingly cold-blooded I.ll leave it up to you. But to argue for his redemption (‘passionate, courageous patriot…’) is stronger than arguing that he was a prick because the argument for redemption is filled with sympathy and not bile. It.s the same with Homeric scholarship. There there are unitarians–who argue Homer was one person–and analysts–who argue that Homer is not one person but a long tradition epic poets. The analysts are probably correct, but I always liked the unitarians because they were loyal to the genius of one man: they loved the Iliad and Odyssey as artists. The analysts I always thought of as being clinical and dry, without love and fellow-feeling.

Castruccio

Now to the good part. History has one fantastic feature: aphorisms by famous folks. Even if apocryphal, they.re fun. So here.s a reward for diligent readers! Enjoy! These are selections, there.s more in the Life of Castruccio:

When a friend was reproving him for having bought a partridge for a ducat, Castruccio said: ‘You would not have spent more than a soldo on it’. When his friend agreed, he replied: ‘A ducat is worth much less to me’.

That one illustrates the difference between price and value. Castruccio believes in value, not price.

When Castruccio said to a man who was a professional philosopher: ‘You are like dogs who are always hanging around those who can feed them best’; the other replied: ‘We are more like doctors who go to those who need them most’.

Like I was intimating at the beginning of this post, there is some kind of ancient enmity between philosophy, history, tragedy, and comedy.

Castruccio was going to sea from Pisa to Leghorn and was overtaken by a dangerous storm that frightened him badly. One of the men who were with Castruccio accused him of cowardice and said he was not afraid of anything. Castruccio replied that he was not surprised, for each person set the right value on his own soul.

A similar reckoning between the value of a ducat and a soldo in the first aphorism.

On being asked how Caesar died, Castruccio said: ‘Would to God I might die like him’.

I have to remember to use this one. It is awesome. It hits the nail on the head by twisting hackneyed thought on its head: his death was proof that he was Caesar. A lesser tyrant would have lived.

And one more for the road:

When someone asked him a favour, and used a lot of superfluous words, Castruccio said to him: ‘When you want anything else of me send another man’. When a similar person had bored him with a long speech and had ended by saying: ‘Perhaps I have tired you by talking too much’; ‘Not at all’, Castruccio said, ‘because I did not her a word you said’.

Until next time, I.m Edwin Wong and apparently I.m Doing Melpomene’s Work by reading Clio.s works.