Castigating Livy: the rape of Lucretia and 'The Old Arcadia.'

Sometime between the fall of 1576 and early 1577, Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey worked through the first three books of Livy's History of Rome, "scrutinizing them," according to Harvey's marginal note, "so far as we could from all points of view, applying a political analysis."(1) The pivotal episode of these early books narrates the founding of the Roman republic (1.58.1-2.5.8). This story, I want to argue, provides the intertextual scaffolding for the final books of The Old Arcadia, which Sidney completed sometime in 1580. While Sidney makes Bloomian hay of Livy's account, the structural similarities between the two works seem evident enough.

Both stories begin with a serious sexual crime committed by a prince. In Livy, Tarquin rapes Lucretia. In Sidney, Musidorus is on the verge of sexually assaulting the sleeping Pamela, who had explicitly begged him to guard her chastity, when he is stopped inflagrante by the intrusion of hostile brigands. Unlike his cousin, Pyrocles does not attempt rape but he does deflower Philoclea, which, because Arcadian law punishes simple fornication with death, is no small offense.

According to Livy, after Tarquin leaves, Lucretia commits suicide in order to prove her innocence. Sidney provides a touching (and occasionally hilarious) parody of this episode: first Pyrocles plays Lucretia, attempting to kill himself so that "it might justly appear that either Philoclea in defending her honour, or else he himself in despair of achieving, had left his carcass proof of his fact but witness of her clearness" (291).(2) His suicide, like Lucretia's, will testify to the inviolate chastity of the injured lady. This plan failing, Pyrocles then switches roles and plays Tarquin, informing Philanax that his "filthy thoughts [had] sought to defile . . . a paradise of unspotted goodness" (301). Between Pyrocles's attempts to appropriate this Livian narrative for his own purposes, Philoclea denounces suicide with arguments borrowed from the discussion of Lucretia's self-inflicted death that opens Saint Augustine's City of God.(3)

In Livy, Brutus then draws the bloody knife from Lucretia's body and vows never again to let Tarquin "nor any other be King in Rome."(4) At this point Sidney's narrative diverges considerably: the princes' sexual offenses lead to the "death" of a king (but not the king who committed the offenses) and consequently to a political crisis, but The Arcadia dismisses the possibility of reconstituting the state on an aristocratic or republican basis as speculations of "the discoursing sort of men" (321).

Book One of Livy's Roman History ends with the expulsion of the Tarquins; Book Two opens with the final struggle between Brutus's republican party and the pro-monarchical faction. A group of young aristocrats, including Brutus's two sons, plot the return of the Tarquins; these young men, Livy explains

had found life under the monarchy very agreeable . . . they had been able to give a freer rein to their appetites (libido) and become accustomed to the life of the court (more regio). Now that everybody was governed by the same law, they missed the freedom to do as they pleased, and began to complain that what might be liberty for others was more like slavery for themselves. A king, they argued, was, after all, a human being, and there was a chance of getting from him what one wanted, rightly or wrongly; under a monarchy there was room for influence and favour; a king could be angry, and forgive; he knew the difference between an enemy and a friend. Law, on the other hand, was impersonal and inexorable. Law had no ears. An excellent thing, no doubt, for paupers, it was worse than useless for the great, as it admitted no relaxation or indulgence towards a man who ventured beyond the bounds of mediocrity.(5)

These youthful plotters are discovered, and Brutus sentences the ringleaders, including his sons, to death, watching the execution with a "father's anguish."(6)

As several critics have remarked, this scene strikingly resembles the trial of Musidorus and Pyrocles.(7) Like Brutus's sons, Sidney's princes both defend aristocratic licence and conspire against the state: Musidorus, one remembers, had intended to gather an army to invade Arcadia (176); in any case, as Euarchus points out, abducting princesses "is no less than treason" (400). Like Brutus, Euarchus sentences his son and nephew to death, for "the name of a child should [not] have force to change the never-changing justice" (411). The conclusion of The Arcadia, of course, departs from Livy; Euarchus's verdict never takes effect because Basilius awakens from his presumed death and simply forgives the offenders.

If the foregoing parallels suggest that Sidney based the concluding scenes of The Arcadia on Livy, the import of this rewriting remains perplexing. The scene where Philoclea plays Augustine to Pyrocles's Lucretia seems rather more comic than either the African saint or the Roman historian would have countenanced. More important, The Arcadia erases the link between rape and republicanism that stands at the ideological center of Livy's narrative. Stephanie Jed has claimed, somewhat cryptically, that the rape of Lucretia should not be viewed as "an inevitable prologue to Rome's liberation but . . . [as] a historical figuration, formed and reformed to serve various interests and needs in different historical moments."(8) Yet if rape in Arcadia does not serve as prologue to liberation, what political needs or interests might it figure? To what historical moment does Sidney's story of young princes violating female chastity and upright fathers executing their lawless sons belong?

It may be best to approach these questions circuitously, looking first at Jed's own intriguing modernist reading of Livy in Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Jed sees Livy's narrative (and subsequent versions of the rape of Lucretia) as obsessed with female unchastity - understood, of course, as an affront to male honor rather than female autonomy.(9) Moreover, given the etymological link between the Latin word meaning "chaste" (castus) and a term frequently used by early Renaissance humanists to describe the correction of faulty manuscripts (castigare), Jed concludes that "the ideal of Lucretia's chastity is translated into the practice of textual editing . . . For the corruption of a text, in the minds of the humanists, was not unlike a rape."(10) Hence correcting texts ``became somewhat of a moral and political crusade to remove the signs of their depravity, violation, corruption, contamination, etc., and to transmit a faithful, chaste, untouched textual tradition to posterity."(11) For Jed, Livy's narrative shapes humanism's philological politics and politicized philology, disclosing their link to patriarchal culture's compulsive need to control women's bodies.

Jed's argument depends on the etymological connection between textual castigation and female chastity This connection exists, but it is not the whole story. Both words come from an Indo-European root meaning "to cut," which on the face of it does not seem a particularly appropriate image for female sexual purity Isidore of Seville's Etyrnologiae gives the real story: namely, that "castus derives from castration (a castratione nuncupatus)"(12) Ancient writers thus use castus and its cognates to describe eunuchs, saints, and Stoics; the terms regularly refer to male purity - both sexual and spiritual - and male impotence.(13) This derivation remains current through the Renaissance. John Ferne's The Blazon of Gentrie (1586), for example, explains that Roman army camps were called "Castra, even of the word Castrare, to geld: since that they ought to be Castrata vel Casta."(14) Pace Jed, the same gendered etymology surfaces in the Renaissance vocabulary of textual editing; in early modern English, one refers to expurgating a work of objectionable material (sexual or otherwise) as "castration": thus in 1587 the Privy Council appointed a committee to "castrate" Holinshed's Chronicles.(15)

Jed's tendentious philology simply erases the fact that, from antiquity through the Renaissance, "chaste thinking" regularly concerned issues of male purity, of the (violent) constraints placed on male sexuality, of the need to control male bodies. This is not a small point. In all heroic societies - whether the German dans first described by Tacitus, Spenser's Irish brigands, or the Homeric tribes or the feudal aristocracy - free-born men do not work. Women and slaves work; chieftains fight, raid, pillage, and (in Ascham's phrase) perpetrate "bold bawdry." Classical and Renaissance political thinkers, in turn, are obsessed by the problem of reducing this warrior nobility to "civility": making brigands and warlords settle down to farming and the professions, turning noblemen into government servants, castigating (to use Jed's term) the lawless appetites of strong men. In Livy, sexual violence epitomizes this more general problem of aristocratic lawlessness; the issue dominates his account of the birth of the Roman republic, an account that begins with Tarquin's rape and climaxes in the revolt of Brutus's sons. Livy identifies monarchical rule with aristocratic male licence - in contrast to a republican government, which subordinates libidinal energies to legal constraints. Brutus's sons dislike republican government precisely because it interferes with the sexual liberty of noble youths, subjecting their desires to the uniform discipline of the law.

Renaissance humanists reproduce this thematic in their own apologiae for republican rule. Thus according to Salutati, republics demand "the sweet bridle of liberty, which is to live according to the law," even though such a constraint "seems like slavery to uncontrolled youth who desire to overstep freedom and live being led by the passions."(16) Or as Hubert Languet, Sidney's friend and tutor, puts it, "the law is reason and wisdom itself . . . But he who leans to the king's fancies, instead of law, prefers brutish sensuality before well-ordered discretion."(17) For early modern republican theorists, the paradigm for this triumph of law over tyrannic lust is, significantly enough, Brutus's execution of his sons. Buchanan thus argues in his De jure regni apud Scotos that rulers should "apportion rewards and punishments . . . in strict accordance with the laws," as Brutus rightly "slew his own sons." Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy likewise defends "the severity of Brutus" as "necessary for the maintenance of . . . liberty," to preserve which "there is no remedy more powerful, valid, healthful, and necessary than the killing of the sons of Brutus."(18) The founding myth of both Roman and Renaissance republicanism associates tyranny with the unchecked freedom of aristocratic male sexuality, and republicanism with the severe and impartial rule of law over these libidinal transgressions.

Sidney radically rewrites this Livian narrative. First, because Euarchus is a king, his insistence upon the rule of law loses any republican coloration; the opposition between monarchic and republican government - the whole point of the traditional story - disappears from The Arcadia. Second, Sidney's princes, despite their sexual and political transgressions, remain the heroes of the story. While the narrator explicitly (although not very vigorously) condemns their experiments with rape and fornication (202, 265), in general the text betrays an indulgent sympathy, if not romantic enthusiasm, for the princes's various deceits, disguises, seductions, and abductions.(19) But if Sidney inverts the political and ethical implications of Livy's narrative, he retains its basic ideological structure: the contrast between law and male sexual desire. Euarchus's judicial summation locates the central issue with abundant clarity: by acknowledging that the evidence for the princes' complicity in Basilius's murder is weak, he refocuses the legal status quaestionis on the double raptus; in response to the princes' claim that their lawbreaking should be excused as the result of the irresistible violence of love (374-75, 402), Euarchus dryly observes: "If that unbrindled desire which is entitled love might purge such a sickness as this, surely we should have many loving excuses of hateful mischiefs. Nay rather, no mischief should be committed that should not be veiled under the name of love. For as well he that steals might allege the love of money . . . as the adulterer the love of a woman; since they do in all speech affirm they love that which an ill-governed passion maketh them to follow. But love may have no such privilege" (406-07).

As both Euarchus and Brutus understand, this refusal to privilege courtly lovers implies a refusal to privilege courtly rank; the rule of law requires the equality of all persons before the law. Livy's narrative makes it clear that the primary motive behind republican constitutionalism is the need to control aristocratic lawlessness. Nor is this view peculiar to republican theory; most ancient political thinkers advocate the uniform rule of law to protect the weak from the rapacity of the powerful.(20) Euarchus's refusal to excuse the princes's law-breaking as the venial exuberance of amour courtois belongs to this tradition; as he explains, "if the governors of justice shall take such a scope as to measure the foot of the law by a show of conveniency . . . young men, strong men, and rich men shall ever find private conveniences how to palliate such committed disorders as to the public shall not only be inconvenient but pestilent" (407). Laws exist to prevent young aristocrats from pursuing their desires. The princes only avoid execution because Basilius wakes up.

But Basilius's "resurrection" does not of itself exonerate the princes, who had been convicted of fornication and abduction, not murder. They survive because Basilius "arbitrarily sets aside the laws which condemned" them; that is, he exercises the specifically royal prerogative of suspending the law in the interests of equity.(21) As Brutus's sons point out, a king has ears and can forgive. But unlike Livy, The Old Arcadia sees this as a good thing; David Norbrook observes that ``Sidney dearly expects his readers to feel the injustice of treating noble and magnanimous princes in the same way as anyone else."(22) The Old Arcadia upholds the cause of young noblemen against the austere law of the father.

One can, I think, see Sidney's drastic rewriting of Livy in terms of Lawrence Stone's familiar "crisis of the aristocracy." The Sidneys, from Sir Philip to Algernon, consistently supported the "ancient powerful warlike nobility" of England as the natural guardians of "the people's liberties" against over-mighty rulers.(23) The final episodes of The Old Arcadia show traces of this aristocratic resistance to Tudor centralization and the crown's attempt to impose the authority of common law on a still-powerful nobility - a reading consistent with at least the surface meaning of the Ister Bank eclogue.(24) Like Spenser's Faerie Queene - the other great document of the chivalric Protestantism championed by the Leicester/Essex faction - The Arcadia celebrates the magnaminity, heroism, and cor gentil of the knight-errant as superior to the "dead pitiless laws" (304) fetishized by statist theory.(25)

Contemporary manuals of chivalry comment explicitly on this tension between aristocratic liberty and legal constraint. Ferne's The Blazon of Gentrie thus includes a debate between a knight, devoted to "mercye, compassion, and curtesie," and a civil lawyer - a debate that hinges on the relative worth of the old armigerous nobility and the "new men" controlling the Tudor bureaucracy;(26) one glimpses the social frictions underlying this clash in Ferne's remark that the English "have peculiar customes and lawes (or rather in this behalfe, common errors) which for that favor they beare to the common and rude people . . . are fitly called common lawes."(27) Ferne has no interest in the state as a constitutional order based on equality before the law. His political vision centers on the individual, on the glorious deeds, innate nobility, and heroic virtues of aristocratic natures, whose privileges the common law attempts to bind by rules suited only to baser spirits.

This aristocratic ultramontanism, one should note, is not confined to Renaissance chivalric handbooks. Aristotle's Politics, despite its overall republican slant, thus affirms that if "there be some one person, or more than one . . . whose excellence is so pre-eminent that the excellence or the political capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal . . . Such a man may truly be deemed a God among men. Hence we see that legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in capacity; and that for men of pre-eminent excellence there is no law - they are themselves a law."(28) The true aristos therefore "ought not be a subject - that would be as if mankind should claim to rule over Zeus." Rather, according to seems to be the order of Nature," Aristotle concludes, such men "should be kings in their state for life."(29)

Sidney seems to think of his princes in terms of this vision of nobility. The narrator consistently portrays them as exceptional natures, resplendent in "the very shining force of excellent virtue," "true magnaminity," "unshaked magnaminity," "true valor," "heroical greatness," and "extraordinary majesty."(30) The story as a whole comes close to implying that its heroes are a law unto themselves; the conclusion thus refers to them as "peerless princes" (417), despite the fact that they have abducted two members of the royal family and deceived the others. Such acts shrink to mere "venial trespasses" because the princes possess a "pre-eminent excellence" - the selfless virtue apparent in Pyrocles's attempts to sacrifice himself in order to preserve Philoclea's honor, in both the princes' contempt of death, and in their willingness to die for each other. Observing their "noble behaviour," Kerxenus thus concludes that "surely either fortune by parentage or nature in creation hath made them princes" (325). They are natural rulers.

Romances, of course, require such heroic individualism. But the moral categories of The Arcadia are not exclusively literary conventions; the same measure of human worth, for example, also underwrites the Sidney-myth. Like Sidney's fiction, his legend pays tribute to the "pre-eminent excellence" of extraordinary natures. In his biography of Sidney, Fulke Greville thus dwells on his friend's "gallant Soul," "rich nature," "extraordinary greatness," "excellencie," and "extraordinary Worth" - testimonies, Greville surmises, that "not only the Endowments of Nature, but even the Enoblements of the Mind, and Genius, are many times inherent in the Bloud and Linage."(31) Hence even in his early twenties, Sidney was a natural ruler: "one of the ripest, and greatest Counsellors of Estate" that Elizabeth possessed.(32) Greville's Sidney resembles Sidney's princes because the same aristocratic ethos constructs both the fictional characters and the cultural persona.

The tensions between aristocratic individualism and royal hegemony may also lurk behind The Arcadia's romantic comedy - not because erotic intrigues allegorize political frustrations but because in monarchic regimes, sex is political. Thus, both Aristotle's Politics and Justine's Epitome analyze republics in terms of constitutional issues, but when the same texts discuss monarchies, they focus on lovers' quarrels, jealousies, intrigues, and entanglements precisely because, under personal rule, personal relationships have political consequences.(33)

Nor is this elision of public and private merely a convention of historiographic discourse. One of Elizabeth's principal means for regulating her nobles was to control, and usually block, aristocratic marriages - a policy that may have some bearing on Basilius's over-protective (and selfish) attempts to keep potential suitors away from his daughters.(34) By 1580 the ambitions of both Sidney and Leicester had run afoul of the Queen's misogamous policies.(35) Like his princes, Sidney had apparently aspired to a forbidden royal marriage; during the late 1570s he seems to have contemplated marrying either a German princess or the eldest daughter of William of Orange, possibilities dropped almost surely because the Queen would have prohibited such unions.(36) Leicester's romantic predicament during the same years likewise seems to have an Arcadian analogue: secretly married in 1578 to Lettice Knollys while still publicly courting the jealous Queen, his incompatible attachments to his secret lover and royal mistress mirror the menage a trois of Pyrocles, Philoclea, and Gynecia. Before 1578, of course, Leicester had hoped to marry the Queen, a match that would have elevated his heir, Sidney, to royal rank. These hopes turned out to be "such stuff as dreams are made on," but dreams of winning princesses by knightly valor and virtue still linger in Arcadia. If Sidney's fiction escapes from history into romance, the romance is shaped by the sexual politics of its historical moment.(37)

The unprovability of this sort of contextual reading need not invalidate its conclusions; the standards of evidence in literary history are necessarily fairly generous. But it seems problematically reductive. It shrinks The Arcadia into a chivalric wish-fulfillment fantasy, an expression of nostalgic class-consciousness. There are sound reasons for ascribing such attitudes to Sidney, who claimed his "chiefest honour . . . to be a Dudley" and whose life was profoundly marked by his ambivalent status as the potential heir to the possible future king of England.(38) But as Renaissance aristocrats go, Sidney was also a rather serious young man; there is a thoughtfulness about him - a cast of mind at once reflective and intellectual - that militates against reading The Arcadia as a naive expression of aristocratic ambition and individualism. By his mid-twenties, Sidney was already a student of contemporary as well as ancient history and political theory.(39) His self-appointed tutor, Hubert Languet, wrote one of the principal statements of monarchomach theory; his friend, Sir Henry Savile, was on the cutting-edge of English Taciteanism; Daniel Rogers, another friend, translated Buchanan's republican De jure regni apud Scotos.(40) It seems, therefore, at least worth exploring the possibility that The Arcadia's astonishing misappropriation of Livy also bespeaks a more theoretical engagement with fundamental issues of late-sixteenth century political thought.

David Norbrook has argued that The Arcadia reflects the ideological project of Languet's Vindiciae contra tyrannos, which would place Sidney's text squarely in the republican tradition - the dominant tradition of Classical political theory (Aristotle, Cicero, Livy), revived by fifteenth-century Florentine humanists and subsequently championed by the Protestant monarchomachs. The aristocratic republicanism of the monarchomachs seems particularly close to the political attitudes implicit in Sidney's romance; as Norbrook notes, their claim that the "subaltern magistrate" had both the right and duty to rebel against a tyrannical prince was designed to sanction the Protestant nobility's resistance to its Catholic rulers. They do not advocate peasant uprisings, whether Protestant or otherwise; rather, they defend the privileges of a spiritual and social elite against Counter-Reformation encroachments.(41)

But even a cursory examination of the principal monarchomach tracts suggests that, except for a shared aristocratic bias, their ideological stance differs from Sidney's at virtually every point. These tracts (like all republican theorizing) insist on the supremacy of law; as Languet argues, royal authority should be subordinate to "the Authority of the Laws," for the "prince is but as the minister and executor of the law."(42) The law, in turn, "is reason and wisdom itself," alone able to bridle the "brutish sensuality" and "unruly desires" of men. Government according to law is superior to personal rule precisely because the law is impersonal, inflexible: "intreaties nor threats cannot make [it] to bow or bend"(43); it has, as Brutus's sons complained, no ears. Significantly, Languet denies that a king may pardon one whom the law condemns.(44)

Languet defends the same position as Livy's Brutus - and Euarchus. The resemblance may not be accidental; Languet's pseudonym in the Vindiciae is Junius Brutus, the eponymous descendent of Sidney's model for Euarchus. But it seems impossible to identify Languet's politics with The Arcadia's authorial voice. The whole emotional and narrative energy of Sidney's romance resists this austerely legalistic republicanism, which allows so little room for royal equity or the erotic escapades of young noblemen. If Sidney pays tribute to Languet in his portrait of Euarchus, the compliment is not unmixed.(45)

Most ancient political thinkers exhibit republican preferences. But there is a second strand in Classical political theory - one that has no name - that undergoes a widespread revival in the late sixteenth century. Modern scholarship recognizes some aspects of movement under the labels "Taciteanism" and "neostoicism," but these designations seem too narrow. I have chosen, rather hesitantly, to call this strand "princely" theory because it prefers (or at least presupposes) personal rule, although unlike absolutist theories it is not obsessed with legitimating kingship, whether on the basis of divine right, natural law, or paternal authority.

It may be misleading to think of princely theory as a self-conscious ideology before the late Renaissance; rather, it seems to have been a sixteenth-century construction amalgamating the non-republican strands of ancient political thought - principally Plato, Seneca, and Tacitus. This ex post facto tradition was largely the creation of the Tacitean scavant Justus Lipsius, Sidney's contemporary and correspondent.(46) Significantly, English interest in the Lipsian canon began with Sidney and his circle.(47) Savile, the first English translator of Tacitus, was Sidney's close friend; Greneway dedicated his translation of the Annals to the Earl of Essex; Sir John Hayward, author of the Tacitean First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IIII, belonged to Essex's retinue.(48)

With respect to The Arcadia, the crucial difference between republican and princely politics concerns the relation between law and equity, a debate that goes back (as most debates do) to Plato and Aristotle.(49) Aristotle's defense of constitutional rule in the Politics takes issue with Plato's thesis in the Statesman that it is better to be governed by wise rulers than by laws, because a ruler can adjust rewards and punishment to particular cases, while the generality and rigidity of the law make it at best an approximate instrument of justice. Plato (speaking through the Athenian Stranger) thus argues that "the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art of kingship and has kingly ability . . . Law can never issue an injunction binding on all which really embodies what is best for each."(50) Although Plato would probably not have appreciated their support, this is precisely the point Brutus's sons make - and precisely the characteristic of kingly authority to which the monarchomachs objected.

Sidney may or may not have known the Statesman. But his own treatment of law and equity strikingly resembles the central text of princely theory - a work everybody knew: Seneca's De clementia.(51) Seneca's essay, addressed (ironically enough) to the young Nero, deals with the same questions posed in the final book of The Arcadia: should those who violate the law be pardoned? should blood ties override legal rules? should youthful transgressions be punished according to the letter of the law? should the ruler govern by the law of the land or by a higher justice?

In Sidney, Euarchus, although initially praised for his equity (351), declares that he will judge the princes "not by a free discourse of reason and skill of philosophy," but according to the strict letter of "the laws of Greece and municipal statutes of this dukedom" (404). To Musidorus's protest that true justice seeks "to preserve and not to destroy mankind" by exacting the death-penalty for every "venial trespass" or ``human error" (402), Euarchus replies that "never-changing justice" does not "measure the foot of the law by a show of conveniency" (407). Having discovered that the princes are his son and nephew, he reiterates these commitments with an anguished fervor: "But, alas, shall justice halt, or shall she wink in one's cause which had lynx's eyes in another's? Or rather, shall all private respects give place to that holy name? Be it so, be it so. Let my grey hairs be laid in the dust with sorrow . . . But never, never, let sacred rightfulness fall. It is immortal, and immortally ought to be preserved. If rightly I have judged, then rightly have I judged mine own children, unless the name of a child should have force to change the never-changing justice. No, no, Pyrocles and Musidorus, I prefer you much before my life, but I prefer justice as far before you" (411).

Seneca's arguments in De clementia offer almost a point-by-point critique of Euarchus's position. The essay defends mercy over justice, equity over law, paternal love over impersonal rules. For Seneca, as for Musidorus, the truly "godlike use of power" is "to save life by crowds and universally," not to ruin its victims.(52) The ruler is therefore superior to the laws because he can mitigate their severity: "to save life is the peculiar privilege of exalted station"; only the prince can exercise clementia, which "sentences not by the letter of the law (sub formula), but in accordance with what is fair and good."(53) A ruler, Seneca adds, must show mercy because, to a greater or lesser degree, all persons have sinned (peccavimus omnes).(54)

And he expands this assertion by a lengthy discussion of how fathers should treat their errant sons. No father, he argues, will "disinherit a son for his first offence"; indeed, "the mildest sort of punishment ought to satisfy a father," especially if his son "was very youthful (adulescentulus)."(55) For men, like "well-bred and high-spirited horses (generosi ac nobiles equz)" should be ruled with "a loose rein" - a strikingly aristocratic metaphor and one that stands in marked contrast to the republican predilection for bridles.(56)

References to De clementia suffuse Lipsius's Sixe Bookes of Politickes, which likewise defends the "way of Clemencie . . . mercie, & pitie, to which all other vetrues do in honor give place."(57) While this treatise, first published in 1589, could not have influenced The Old Arcadia, its political morality is strikingly close to Sidney's romance. In Lipsius's words: "neither ought Justice to take offence, if our Prince do not alwayes (as we may) follow it at the heeles, which cannot be without the ruine, and overthrow of mankind . . . But shall he still punish with rigor? not if he regard the common profit: for severitie by the often use thereof, weakeneth authoritie . . . . The other way of Clemencie is farre better: and it is profitable for a good, and gracious Prince, sometimes to passe the limites of equitie, to shew his clemencie."(58) Some of Lipsius's further observations also have a bearing on The Arcadia insofar as they suggest certain corrollaries that follow from valorizing equity over the strict letter of the law. In particular, unlike virtually every prior political thinker (except Machiavelli), Lipsius allows the use of deception for virtuous ends. Lipsius, as he is at pains to stress, is a moralist not a Machiavel; yet, he argues, it may "be sometimes lawfull, and reasonable to trace out indirect courses, in this tempestuous sea of affayres of the world."(59) For a prince, dissimulation, "which discovereth the countenance, and covereth the mind . . . is so necessarie . . . that the old Emperour sayd, that he knew not wel how to beare rule, that knew not how to dissemble."(60) Without wishing to press the analogy too hard, the morality that implicitly condones the deceits and disguises of Sidney's princes seems of a piece with this justification of "indirect courses" for virtuous ends. If nothing else, Lipsius's qualified defense of dissimulation suggests that this was a live issue in the avant-garde political circles in which Sidney moved - and that such a defense is not incompatible with a politics based on piety and mercy, the other principal attributes of Lipsius's ideal prince. The argument thus far seems quite straightforward: Sidney subverts Livy's narrative, metamorphosing his republican myth celebrating the triumph of law over libido into an apologia for aristocratic liberty, an apologia that draws on the Elizabethan chivalric revival and the avantgarde political thought of the late sixteenth century. These shape the climax of The Arcadia: its valorization of equity over law, clemency over strict justice, noble natures over impersonal codes, aristocratic privilege over legalistic impartiality. The Arcadia transforms Livy's plot, which identifies republicanism with the subjection of aristocratic male sexuality to the uniform discipline of law, into a story of young noblemen's unlawful yet virtuous passions rewarded by royal equity.

Thus far, however, the presiding spirit of princely theory has not figured in the discussion. Sidney dearly knew Tacitus's works, widely available in Lipsius's 1574 edition, recommending them to his brother in a letter dated October, 1580, and drawing on Tacitus's account of the German legions' mutiny for his description of the Arcadian peasant revolt.(61) Tacitean ironies also suffuse the final episodes of The Arcadia, particularly Sidney's portrait of Euarchus as a wise, impartial, and experienced judge of men, who nevertheless misreads both the deeds and moral character of the princes. His failure to understand what really happened insinuates a skepticism about the ability of human reason - and hence of human justice - to discern truth from rumor, distortion, and insinuation.(62) Sidney's contemporaries were, in fact, struck by his skepticism, rare among sixteenth-century Englishmen. Raleigh thus observed that "it was well noted by that worthie gentleman Sir Philip Sidnie, that historians doe borrow of poets, not onely much of their ornament, but somewhat of their substance. Informations are often false, records not alwaies true, and notorious actions commonly insufficient to discover the passions, which did set them first on foote."(63) It is no accident that Euarchus, for all his wisdom and impartiality, fails "to discover the passions" responsible for the crisis in Arcadia.

This is pure Taciteanism. Historical skepticism permeates Tacitus's writings; all that remains to the historian, he grimly observes, are "conflicting rumors," for "so obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity."(64) Such doubts about the possibility of knowing the truth of things suffuse the Annals; in the midst of recounting Germanicus's death, for example, Tacitus comments that "it is doubtful whether . . . [the body] exhibited the marks of poisoning. For men according as they pitied Germanicus and were prepossessed with suspicion or were biased by partiality towards Piso, gave conflicting accounts."(65) Like Sidney's wise judge, the Tacitean historian cannot pierce the fog of conjecture and probabilities that enshrouds the domain of historical and juridic inquiry.

The Annals, in fact, betray a deep distrust of law, not only as a method of inquiry but also as an instrument of moral reform. Attempts to legislate "public morals," Tacitus observes, either apply "remedies more terrible than the evils" or simply multiply criminals by criminalizing pleasures.(66) This pessimism, so different from the typical republican celebration of law, also infiltrates Arcadia, whose severe laws against fornication seem at once a terrible and ineffectual remedy.

In Tacitus, there is no escape from the realm of conjecture and rumor. In The Arcadia, however, fiction comes to the rescue of history, with Basilius's "resurrection" solving the epistemic crisis. The justice that triumphs in the end is poetic rather than political; the narrative does not indicate how, lacking a deus ex machina, one might recognize truth or virtue. Kerxenus, an Arcadian nobleman, decides that the princes must be innocent because "heroical greatness shines in their eyes" (325), but, except in romances, this seems a dubious inference.

As previously mentioned, Basilius's awakening does not itself exonerate the princes, who remain guilty of various treasonable offenses; nor does Sidney inform us why Basilius forgives them. We pardon them because we know that they are truly good and noble, and we know this because fiction, in the words of Sidney's Apology for Poetry, has access to "the secretest cabinet" of men's souls.(67) The poet can make visible the inner motives that give ethical meaning to actions and events, whereas, according to the same work, the historian "many times . . . must tell events whereof he can yield no cause; or if he do, it must be poetical."(68) Poetic justice is superior to legal conjecture because the former is based on a knowledge of the motives hidden in the heart's "secretest cabinets." As An Apology declares, the poet alone "maketh magnaminity and justice shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires."(69)

The New Arcadia largely erases the Livian subtext of the earlier version: because the princes do not violate their ladies' chastity, the analogy with Livy's aristocratic libertines vanishes - or rather seems to be transferred to Amphialus, whose forcible abduction of an unwilling Philodea seems closer to Tarquin's rape than to the youthful erotic freedoms that Brutus's sons claim as their birthright. But if The Old Arcadia's princely politics and aristocratic ethos turn into something quite different in Sidney's revised romance, they carry over into An Apology for Poetry. The original Arcadia's skepticism about law as an instrument of moral reform and its claim that inner virtue rather than outward obedience to the law - constitutes the true subject of ethical judgment both underwrite An Apology's arguments for poetry's superiority to law and history. The law, Sidney observes, considers only external compliance with its precepts; nor can the historian with "his bare was" see behind events to their motives and causes.(70) Law and history suffer Euarchus's limitations and are liable to his mistakes. Only the poet can disclose "all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats laid to the view that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them."(71)

But the hero of An Apology is no longer the prince but the poet. Mary Thomas Crane has argued that An Apology's defense of "the natural creative power of the imagination" provided "the first serious theoretical basis in England for aristocratic modes of behavior and discourse."(72) This claim, however, may work better in reverse: the aristocratic modes of behavior and discourse in The Old Arcadia provide the ideological basis for Sidney's subsequent defense of the natural creative power of the imagination. The Arcadian princes transfer their titles to Sidney's "peerless poet," because, as Sidney puts it, "the laurel crown appointed for triumphing captains cloth worthily . . . honor the poet's triumph."(73) An Apology's metaphors signal the exchange: the "poet's nobleness" gives his skills "a most just title to be princes over all the rest"; "of all sciences . . . is our poet the monarch," whose "most princely" power transforms learning into virtue and whose "counsel can . . . direct a prince."(74) Like the desires of noble youths, the poet's "high flying liberty of conceit" disdains "to be tied to any . . . subjection." Rather, "with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing . . . [nature's] doings." Like the Arcadian princes, Sidney's poet, although armed only with a quill, is an Aristotelian "god among men." And, of course, despite their natural pre-eminence, "peerless poets" and "peerless princes" alike - at least according to severer moralists - show an alarming propensity for "wanton sinfulness and lustful love," not to mention a tendency to lie.(75)

A fine line separates An Apology for Poetry from Sidney's apologia for Brutus's sons. If this line traces the fissure between the corporate, aristocratic culture of the Middle Ages and the trinity of author, imagination, and individual, then it configures this movement not as a radical break with the past but a delicate modulation of an inherited paradigm. Yet, because this movement begins with Tarquin's rape and ends with a defense of the moral power of poetry, it may point to as significant an aspect of the civilizing process (largely a process of finding something for aristocratic men to do besides rape and pillage) as the slow submission of the nobility to the equalizing rule of law.(76)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 

1 Jardine, 36-37.

2 All references to The Old Arcadia are to Robertson's 1973 edition.

3 Compare Philoclea's arguments against suicide (Sidney, 1973, 294, 298) with The City of God 1.17-26. Robertson notes the parallels in her commentary on The Old Arcadia (Sidney, 1973, 471).

4 Livy, 1952, 1.59.1.

5 Livy, 2.3.24; translation adapted from Livy, 1960, 108.

6 Livy, 1952, 2.5.8.

7 Duncan-Jones, 119; Sidney, 1973, 485.

8 Jed, 7.

9 Ibid, 5-11.

10 Ibid., 45-47.

11 Ibid., 32.

12 Isidore, 10.33.

13 For example, "nemini . . . [philosophorum] castite, pietate, justitia, fortitudine . . . cesserit" (Pliny, 1.22.7); "pueros . . . custos / dis . . . dicere carmen" (Horace, Carmen saeclare, in Odes and Epodes, 6-8); "casturn ease decet pinto poetam / ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest" (Catullus, 16.5); "Attis / turrigeram casto vinxit amore deam" (Ovid, 4.223-24); "tanquam castigando et castrando . . . saeculo erudimur a Domino" (Tertullian, De cultu feminarum 2.9, in Patrologia Latina, 1:1442); "puer qui innocentiam tenerae servet actaris . . . incorrupti corporis castimoniam custodiat" (Ambrose, De Abraham libri duo 1.5.39, Patrologia Latina 14:459); "[Deus] castus aeternitate, nos casti fide" (Augustine, In epistolam Joannis ad Parthos 4.9, Patrologia Latina 35:2010). Numerous additional examples can be found in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900-), 3:530-42, 564-72.

14 Ferne, 114. In Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Cyrus literally castrates his bodyguard, since eunuchs "become the more gentle by being deprived of this desire . . . . [but] not at all the less fit for service in war" (Xenophon, 302-03).

15 Patterson, 129. Abraham Fleming, the working editor for the 1587 edition of the Chronicles, thus entitled his (now lost) accounts of their censorship De castratione Chronicorum and De modo castrandi reformandiq; Chronica predicta brevis & vera relatio (See Castanien, 27). The Oxford English Dictionary cites additional instances of "castrate" used in this sense from the early seventeenth century through the nineteenth. Similarly, the prefatory letter to Gascoigne's The Poesies describes the work as having been "gelded from all flithie phrases" (Hr).

16 Quoted in Jed, 27.

17 [Languet], 145-46. Other scholars attribute the treatise to Du Plessis Mornay or, alternatively, to the joint efforts of both men.

18 Buchanan, 58, 92, 143; Machiavelli, 405, 162. See also Beacon, 7, 59.

19 For the alternative view - that Euarchus is Arcadia's hero, the embodiment of its moral and political ideals - see Raitiere, 35, 51; Greenlaw, 279; Lindenbaum, 181; Lanham, 316, 368-72. For a summary of the arguments for and against Euarchus, see McCoy, 1979, 132-36.

20 Thus in Plato's Gorgias Callicles complains that "those who framed the laws are the weaker folk, the majority"; these "frame the laws . . . to prevent the stronger who are able to overreach them from gaining the advantage over them" (483b-c; in Plato, 266). See also, Ovid, Fasti 3.279: "Inde datae leges, ne fortior omnia posset."

21 Norbrook, 96, 101.

22 Ibid., 101.

23 Algernon Sidney, "Court Maxims," 71, 131-33; quoted Worden, 188. The Cabinet-Council - often attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, although first published by Milton in 1658 - makes similar claims (see Parker, 1:517).

24 Stone, 29, 266, 269, 223; McCoy, 1989, 2-3, 34-35; Whigham, 72-73; Sinfield, 398.

25 Helgerson, 40-59.

26 Ferne, 35-42, 97.

27 Ibid., 84.

28 Aristotle, Politics 3.13.1284a3-18 in Aristotle, 2:2037. In his edition of the Politics, Louis le Roy glosses this passage with a long quotation from Plato's Gorgias in which Callicles defends the rule of the strong over the rule of law (34). Interestingly, the narrator's remark in The Arcadia that "one man's sufficiency is more available than ten thousand's multitude - so ill balanced be the extremities of popular minds, and so much natural imperiousness there rests in a well formed spirit" (364) seems to echo Callicles's claim (as summarized by Socrates) that "one sensible man is often more powerful than ten thousand fools and it is right that he should rule and they be subjects" (Gorgias 490a). See also Botero, 14.

29 Aristotle, 3.13.1284630-34.

30 Sidney, 1973, 314, 294, 302, 325.

31 Greville, The Epistle Dedicatory and 7, 10, 32.

32 Ibid., 27.

33 Aristotle, Politics, 5.10.1310a-1313a; Justin, 1.1-3, 2.7. One should add that the politicization of personal relationships in monarchic historiography concerns not only erotic relations but all intimate ties of blood or affinity, particularly fraternal bonds.

34 Stone, 605-06.

35 As Blair Worden has pointed out, the title-page for the 1593 Arcadia associates Musidorus with Leicester's Dudley arms, Pyrocles with Sidney's family crest (The Sound of Virtue, 313).

36 Duncan-Jones, 132-34; Wilson, 238.

37 Critics have long suspected that The Arcadia presents some sort of veiled commentary on Elizabethan court politics. Most of these topical readings, however, from Greenlaw's 1913 article entitled "Sidney's Arcadia as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory" to Blair Women's massive 1996 book, The Sound of Virtue, have struggled to connect Sidney's romance to the controversy over the French match; these readings thus focus almost exclusively on Basilius, whose neglect of princely duties and foolish infatuation corresponds to and critiques Elizabeth's romantic involvement with the Duke of Anjou. Yet even if one accepts the analogy between Basilius and Elizabeth (which has never seemed to me wholly convincing), this cannot be central to The Arcadia because the romance is not about Basilius, whose adventures and amours have no conceivable relation to the French match.

38 Sidney, 1824, 264.

39 See his letter of 18 October 1580, to Robert Sidney, reprinted in Sidney, 1962, 130-33.

40 Norbrook, 93.

41 Ibid., 98.

42 Languet, 63, 152. See also Buchanan, 92, 129; Machiavelli, 405, 408-09.

43 Languet, 145-46.

44 Ibid., 153.

45 On Sidney's somewhat mixed feelings towards Languet, see Duncan-Jones, 71.

46 Salmon, 1991, 170-71.

47 Salmon, 1989, 205; Levy, 1987, 9.

48 Ibid., 173-74.

49 Sidney's interest in the relation between law and equity may owe something to Gabriel Harvey, who in 1578 participated in a disputation before the Queen on whether "clemency was more praiseworthy in a magistrate than severity (clementia magis in Principe laudanda quam seueritas)" (Nichols, 2:109-14). See also Samuel Daniel's moving verse epistle "To Sr. Thomas Egerton," which praises equity over written laws that, as in Livy, "haue nor eares nor sight" (Daniel, 1:191-98). Daniel also had ties to the Sidney circle through his patron, the Countess of Pembroke.

50 Plato, Statesman 294a.

51 "Clemency" (or clementia) and equity both translate the Greek epieikeia.

52 De clementia 1.26.5 in Seneca, 1:429.

53 De clementia, 1.5.7; 2.7.3. Viperani makes a similar point in his 1569 De rege, et regno liber: "to follow absolute legality, and to do nothing from equity or mercy, what else is this but a display of iniquity and tyrannical ruthlessness" (quoted in Tuck, 34).

54 De clementia, 1.6.3.

55 Ibid., 1.14.1; 1.14.7.

56 Ibid., 1.24.2.

57 Ibid., 33.

58 Lipsius., 32-33.

59 Ibid., 114. Conversely, Cicero's De officiis, a central text for both republican and monarchic political thought in the Renaissance, prohibits deception since its basic premise is the inseparability of bonum and utile.

60 Ibid., 117.

61 Greenblatt, 354. For example, Sidney's rather cynical observation on the rebellion in Arcadia, that "indeed, no ill way it is in such mutinies to give them some occasion of such service as they may think in their own judgements may countervail their trespass. . . . [Hence] their fellows, that were most glad to have such a mean to show their loyalty, dispatched most of them with a good rule: that to he leaders in disobedience teacbeth ever disobedience to the same leaders" (131-32), seems to echo Tacitus's remarks on the mutiny of the German legions (Annals 1.44, 49).

62 On Sidney's historical skepticism, see Woolf, 35, 132.

63 Ibid., 52.

64 Tacitus, Annals 3.19.

65 Ibid., Annals 2.73. Compare The Arcadia's final comment on Gynecia: "so uncertain are mortal judgements, the same person most infamous and most famous, and neither justly" (416).

66 Ibid., Annals 3.27; 3.53-54.

67 Sidney, 1970, 26.

68 Ibid., 33.

69 Ibid., 48.

70 Ibid., 26, 33.

71 Ibid., 29.

72 Crane, 189.

73 Sidney, 1970, 27, 51.

74 Sidney, 1970, 23, 38, 41, 29.

75 Sidney, 1970, 11, 14, 17, 58.

76 See Levy, 1986, 10.

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