Machiavelli's Art of War: A Reconsideration*
Abstract Machiavelli's Art of War contains an unexplored and unexplained paradox: the dialogue's chief interlocutor is Fabrizio Colonna, a condottiere in the employ of Ferdinand of Aragon, who played a critical role in the Spanish conquest of northern Italy and in the collapse of the Florentine republic led by Piero Soderini, in which Machiavelli worked as a civil servant. Yet, Machiavelli chooses Fabrizio to defend the superiority of the citizen militia, which he associates with republican civic virtue, over mercenary troops. This paradox has remained unaccounted for because literary scholars have ignored the historical background underlying the text's assorted political subtexts, while historians have ignored the nature of Quattrocento dialogue, as a literary genre, in contextualizing the work. Once these historical and literary dimensions of the Art of War are brought together, it can be seen why Fabrizio Colonna would have been perceived, by Machiavelli and his audience, as the ideal representative of a military position which he espoused neither in theory or in practice.
The Martial "Virtue" of Rhetoric in Machiavelli's "Art of War.".
Machiavelli's humanistic apprehension of manly virtue generally suggests his intellectual debt to classical rhetoric. The substance, placement, and form of Machiavelli's arguments in the Art of War specifically indicate his consciousness of traditional rhetorical methods and comprise a Renaissance commentary on the ideal union of wisdom and eloquence.
Rhetoric in the Middle Ages
MEDIAEVAL and Renaissance rhetoricians and philosophers, following the example of Cicero, seldom omit from their treatment of rhetoric some consideration of the subject matter, nature, and end of the art. Long before Cicero rhetoric had become one of the focal points of the differences of philosophic schools, and the practice and application of the art had long wandered from field to field, reflecting, and sometimes even affecting, the complexities of philosophic discussions. Yet rhetoric is treated as a simple verbal discipline, in histories which touch upon it, as the art of speaking well, applied either as it was in Rome to forensic oratory and associated with the interpretation of laws or, more frequently, applied as it was in the Renaissance in the interpretation and use of the works of orators and poets, and associated with or even indistinguishable from poetic and literary criticism. The history of rhetoric as it has been written since the Renaissance is therefore in part the distressing record of the obtuseness of writers who failed to study the classics and to apply rhetoric to literature, and in part the monotonous enumeration of doctrines, or preferably sentences, repeated from Cicero or commentators on Cicero. Scholarly labors have reconstructed only a brief and equivocal history for rhetoric during the Middle Ages. The development consists of slight and unoriginal increments of erudition in the compendia composed from the fourth to the ninth century which were derived largely from the De Inventione of Cicero and the Ad Herennium and in later commentaries and treatises until in the twelfth century they reflect and use doctrines from Quintilian and from the later rhetorical works of Cicero, the