VOLUME XVII SLICE II Luray Cavern to Mackinac Island (continued 10)

Special officials were naturally attached to the service of the finances. Over the whole department in the Seleucid realm there presided a single chief (ὁ ἐπὶ τῶν προσόδων, App. Syr. 45). How far the financial administration was removed from the competence of the provincial governors, as it seems to have been in Alexander’s system, we cannot say. Seleucus at any rate, as satrap of Babylonia, controlled the finances of the province (Diod. xix. 55, 3), and so, in the Ptolemaic system, did the governor of Cyprus (Polyb. xxvii. 13). The fact that provincial officials ἐπὶ πῶν προσόδων (in Eriza, Bull. corr. hell. xv. 556) are found does not prove anything, since it leaves open the question of their being subordinate to the governor.

With the exception of Ptolemaic Egypt, the Macedonian kingdoms followed in their coinage that of Alexander. Money was for a long while largely struck with Alexander’s own image and superscription; the gold and silver 5. Coinage. coined in the names of Antigonid and Seleucid kings and by the minor principalities of Asia, kept to the Attic standard which Alexander had established. Only in Egypt Ptolemy I. adopted, at first the Rhodian, and afterwards the Phoenician, standard, and on this latter standard the Ptolemaic money was struck during the subsequent centuries. Money was also struck in their own name by the cities in the several dynasties’ spheres of power, but in most cases only bronze or small silver for local use. Corinth, however, was allowed to go on striking staters under Antigonus Gonatas; Ephesus, Cos and the greater cities of Phoenicia retained their right of coinage under Seleucid or Ptolemaic supremacy.

In language and manners the courts of Alexander’s successors were Greek. Even the Macedonian dialect, which it was considered proper for the kings to use on occasion, was often forgotten (Plut. Ant. 27). The Oriental features which 6. The Court. Alexander had introduced were not copied. There was no proskynesis (or certainly not in the case of Greeks and Macedonians), and the king did not wear an Oriental dress. The symbol of royalty, it is true, the diadem, was suggested by the head-band of the old Persian kings (Just. xii. 3, 8); but, whereas, that had been an imposing erection, the Hellenistic diadem was a simple riband. The king’s state dress was the same in principle as that worn by the Macedonian or Thessalian horsemen, as the uniform of his own cavalry officers. Its features were the broad-brimmed hat (kausia), the cloak (chlamys) and the high-laced boots (krepīdes) (Plut. Ant. 54; Frontinus, iii. 2, 11). These, in the case of the king, would be of richer material, colour and adornment. The diadem could be worn round the kausia; the chlamys offered scope for gorgeous embroidery; and the boots might be crimson felt (see the description of Demetrius’ chlamys and boots, Plut. Dem. 41). There were other traces in the Hellenistic courts of the old Macedonian tradition besides in dress. One was the honour given to prowess in the chase (Polyb. xxii. 3, 8; Diod. xxxiv. 34). Another was the fashion for the king to hold wassail with his courtiers, in which he unbent to an extent scandalous to the Greeks, dancing or indulging in routs and practical jokes.6

The prominent part taken by the women of the royal house was a Macedonian characteristic. The history of these kingdoms furnishes a long list of queens and princesses who were ambitious and masterful politicians, of which the great Cleopatra is the last and the most famous. The kings after Alexander, with the exception of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Pyrrhus, are not found to have more than one legitimate wife at a time, although they show unstinted freedom in divorce and the number of their mistresses. The custom of marriages between brothers and sisters, agreeable to old Persian as to old Egyptian ethics, was instituted in Egypt by the second Ptolemy when he married his full sister Arsinoë Philadelphus. It was henceforth common, though not invariable, among the Ptolemies. At the Seleucid court there seems to be an instance of it in 195, when the heir-apparent, Antiochus, married his sister Laodice. The style of “sister” was given in both courts to the queen, even when she was not the king’s sister in reality (Strack, Dynastie, Nos. 38, 40, 43; Archiv. f. Papyr, i. 205). The “Friends” of the king are often mentioned. It is usual for him to confer with a council (συνέδριον) of his “Friends” before important decisions, administrative, military or judicial (e.g. Polyb. v. 16, 5; 22, 8). They form a definite body about the king’s person (φίλων σύνταγμα, Polyb. xxxi. 3, 7); cf. οἱ φίλοι in contrast with αἱ δυνάμεις, id. v. 50, 9), admission into which depends upon his favour alone, and is accorded, not only to his subjects, but to aliens, such as the Greek refugee politicians (e.g. Hegesianax, Athen. iv. 155b; Hannibal and the Aetolian Thoas take part in the councils of Antiochus III. A similar body, with a title corresponding to φίλοι, is found in ancient Egypt (Erman, Ancient Egypt, Eng. trans., p. 72) and in Persia (Spiegel. Eran. Alt. iii. 626); but some such support is so obviously required by the necessities of a despot’s position that we need not suppose it derived from any particular precedent. The Friends (at any rate under the later Seleucid and Ptolemaïc reigns) were distinguished by a special dress and badge of gold analogous to the stars and crosses of modern orders. The dress was of crimson (πορφύρα); this and the badges were the king’s gift, and except by royal grant neither crimson nor gold might, apparently, be worn at court (1 Macc. 10, 20; 62; 89; 11, 58; Athen. v. 211b). The order of Friends was organized in a hierarchy of ranks, which were multiplied as time went on. In Egypt we find them classified as συγγενεῖς, ὁμότιμοι τοῖς συγγενέσιν, ἀρχισωματοφύλακες, πρῶτοι φίλοι, φίλοι (in the narrower sense), διάδοχοι. For the Seleucid kingdom συγγενεῖς, πρῶτοι φίλοι and φίλοι are mentioned. These classes do not appear in Egypt before the 2nd century; Strack conjectures that they were created in imitation of the Seleucid court. We have no direct evidence as to the institutions of the Seleucid court in the 3rd century. Certain σωματοφύλακες of Antiochus I. are mentioned, but we do not know whether the name was not then used in its natural sense (Strack, Rhein. Mus. LV., 1900, p. 161 seq.; Wilamowitz, Archiv f. Pap. I., p. 225; Beloch, Gr. Gesch. iii (i), p. 391). As to Macedonia, whatever may have been the constitution of the court, it is implied that it offered in its externals a sober plainness in comparison with the vain display and ceremonious frivolities of Antioch and Alexandria (Polyb. xvi, 22, 5; Plut. Cleom. 31; Arat, 15). The position of a Friend did not carry with it necessarily any functions; it was in itself purely honorary. The ministers and high officials were, on the other hand, regularly invested with one or other of the ranks specified. The chief of these ministers is denoted ὁ ἐπὶ τῶν πραγμάτων, and he corresponds to the vizier of the later East. All departments of government are under his supervision, and he regularly holds the highest rank of a kinsman. When the king is a minor, he acts as guardian or regent (ἐπίτροπος). Over different departments of state we find a state secretary (ἐπιστολογράφος or ὑπομνηματογράφος: Seleucid, Polyb. xxxi, 3, 16; Ptolemaic, Strack, Inschriften 103) and a minister of finance (ὁ ἐπὶ τῶν προσόδων in the Seleucid kingdom; App. Syr. 45; διοικήτης in Egypt, Lumbroso, Econ. Pol. p. 339). Under each of these great heads of departments was a host of lower officials, those, for instance, who held to the province a relation analogous to that of the head of the department of the realm. Such a provincial authority is described as ἐπὶ τῶν προσόδων in the inscription of Eriza (Bull. corr. hell. xv. 556). Beside the officials concerned with the work of government we have those of the royal household: (1) the chief-physician, ἀρχιατρός (for the Seleucid see App. Syr. 59; Polyb. v. 56, 1; Michel, No. 1158; for the Pontic, Bull. corr. hell. vii. 354 seq.); (2) the chief-huntsman, ἀρχικυνηγός (Dittenb. Orient. Graec. 99); (3) the maître-d’hôtel ἀρχεδέατρος (Dittenb. Orient. Graec. 169) (4) the lord of the queen’s bedchamber, ὁ επὶ τοῦ κοιτῶνος τὴς βασιλίσσης (Dittenb. Orient. Graec. 256). As in the older Oriental courts, the high positions were often filled by eunuchs (e.g. Craterus, in last mentioned inscription).

It was customary, as in Persia and in old Macedonia, for the great men of the realm to send their children to court to be brought up with the children of the royal house. Those who had been so brought up with the king were styled his σύντροφοι (for the Seleucid, Polyb. v. 82, 8 and xxxi. 21, 2; Bull. corr. hell. i. 285; 2 Macc. ix. 29; for the Ptolemaic σύντροφοι παίδισκαι of the queen, Polyb. xv. 33, 11; for the Pontic, Bull. corr. hell. vii. 355; for the Pergamene. Polyb. xxxii. 27, 10, &c.; for the Herodian, Acts 13). It is perfectly gratuitous to suppose with Deissmann that “the fundamental meaning had given place to the general meaning of intimate friend.” With this custom we may perhaps bring into connexion the office of τροφεύς (Polyb. xxxi. 20, 3; Michel, No. 1158). As under Alexander, so under his successors, we find a corps of βασιλικοί παῖδες. They appear as a corps, 600 strong, in a triumphal procession at Antioch (Polyb. xxxi. 3, 17; cf. v. 82, 13; Antigonid, Livy, xlv. 6; cf. Curtius, viii. 6, 6).

All the Hellenistic courts felt it a great part of prestige to be filled with the light of Hellenic culture. A distinguished philosopher or man of letters would find them bidding for his presence, and most of the great names are 7. Hellenic Culture. associated with one or other of the contemporary kings. Antigonus Gonatas, bluff soldier-spirit that he was, heard the Stoic philosophers gladly, and, though he failed to induce Zeno to come to Macedonia, persuaded Zeno’s disciple, Persaeus of Citium, to enter his service. Nor was it philosophers only who made his court illustrious, but poets like Aratus. The Ptolemaic court, with the museum attached to it, is so prominent in the literary and scientific history of the age that it is unnecessary to give a list of the philosophers, the men of letters and science, who at one time or other ate at King Ptolemy’s table. One may notice that the first Ptolemy himself made a contribution of some value to historical literature in his account of Alexander’s campaigns; the fourth Ptolemy not only instituted a cult of Homer but himself published tragedies; and even Ptolemy Euergetes II. issued a book of memoirs. The Pergamene court was in no degree behind the Ptolemaic in its literary and artistic zeal. The notable school of sculpture connected with it is treated elsewhere (see Greek Art); to its literary school we probably owe in great part the preservation of the masterpieces of Attic prose (Susemihl I., p. 4), and two of its kings (Eumenes I. and Attalus III.) were themselves authors. The Seleucid court did not rival either of the last named in brilliance of culture; and yet some names of distinction were associated with it. Under Antiochus I. Aratus carried out a recension of the Odyssey, and Berossus composed a Babylonian history in Greek; under Antiochus III. Euphorion was made keeper of the library at Antioch. Antiochus IV., of course, the enthusiastic Hellenist, filled Antioch with Greek artists and gave a royal welcome to Athenian philosophers. Even in the degenerate days of the dynasty, Antiochus Grypus, who had been brought up at Athens, aspired to shine as a poet. The values recognized in the great Hellenistic courts and the Greek world generally imposed their authority upon the dynasties of barbarian origin. The Cappadocian court admitted the full stream of Hellenistic culture under Ariarathes V. (Diod. xxxi. 19, 8). One of the kings called Nicomedes in Bithynia offered immense sums to acquire the Aphrodite of Praxiteles from the Cnidians (Plin. N.H. xxxvi. 21), and to a king Nicomedes the geographical poem of the Pseudo-Scymnus is dedicated. Even Iranian kings in the last century B.C. found pleasure in composing, or listening to, Greek tragedies, and Herod the Great kept Greek men of letters beside him and had spasmodic ambitions to make his mark as an orator or author (Nicol. Dam. frag. 4; F.H.G. III. p. 350).

The offering of divine honours to the king, which we saw begin under Alexander, became stereotyped in the institutions of the succeeding Hellenistic kingdoms. Alexander himself was after his death the object of various 8. Divine Honours. local cults, like that which centred in the shrine near Erythrae (Strabo, xiv. 644). His successors in the first years after his death recognized him officially as a divinity, except Antipater (Suïdas, s.v. Αντίπατρος), and coins began to be issued with his image. At Alexandria the state cult of him seems to have been instituted by the second Ptolemy, when his body was laid in the Sema (Otto, Priester u. Tempel, i. 139 seq.). The successors themselves received divine honours. Such worship might be the spontaneous homage of a particular Greek community, like that offered to Antigonus by Scepsis in 311 (Journ. of Hell. Stud. xix. 335 seq.), the Antigonus and Demetrius by Athens in 307, to Ptolemy I. by the Rhodians in 304, or by Cassandrea to Cassander, as the city’s founder (Ditt. 2nd ed. 178); or it might be organized and maintained by royal authority. The first proved instance of a cult of the latter kind is that instituted at Alexandria by the second Ptolemy for his father soon after the latter’s death in 283/2, in which, some time after, 279/8, he associated his mother Berenice also, the two being worshipped together as θεοὶ σωτῆρες (Theoc. xvii. 121 seq.). Antiochus I. followed the Ptolemaic precedent by instituting at Seleucia-in-Pieria a cult for his father as Seleucus Zeus Nicator. So far we can point to no instance of a cult of the living sovereign (though the cities might institute such locally) being established by the court for the realm. This step was taken in Egypt after the death of Arsinoë Philadelphus (271) when she and her still-living brother-husband, Ptolemy II., began to be worshipped together as θεοὶ ἀδελφοί. After this the cult of the reigning king and queen was regularly maintained in Greek Egypt, side by side with that of the dead Ptolemies. Under Antiochus II. (261-246) a document shows us a cult of the reigning king in full working for the Seleucid realm, with a high priest in each province, appointed by the king himself; the document declares that the Queen Laodice is now to be associated with the king. The official surname of Antiochus II., Theos, suggests that he himself had here been the innovator. Thenceforward, in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the East the worship of the living sovereign became the rule, although it appears to have been regarded as given in anticipation of an apotheosis which did not become actual till death. In the Pergamene kingdom at any rate, though the living king was worshipped with sacrifice, the title θεός was only given to those who were dead (Cardinali, Regno di Pergamo, p. 153). The Antigonid dynasty, simpler and saner in its manners, had no official cult of this sort. The divine honours offered on occasion by the Greek cities were the independent acts of the cities.

See Plut. Arat. 45; Cleom. 16; Kornemann, “Zur Gesch. d. antiken Herrscherkulte” in Beiträge z. alt. Gesch. i. 51 sqq.; Otto, Priester u. Tempel, pp. 138 seq.

There does not seem any clear proof that the surnames which the Hellenistic kings in Asia and Egypt bore were necessarily connected with the cult, even if they were used to describe the various kings in religious ceremonies. Some had 9. Surnames. doubtless a religious colour, Theos, Epiphanes, Soter; others a dynastic, Phitopator, Philometor, Philadelphus. Under what circumstances, and by whose selection, the surname was attached to a king, is obscure. It is noteworthy that while modern books commonly speak of the surnames as assumed, the explanations given by our ancient authorities almost invariably suppose them to be given as marks of homage or gratitude (English Historical Review, xvi. 629 (1901). The official surnames must not, of course, be confused with the popular nicknames which were naturally not recognized by the court, e.g. Ceraunus (“Thunder”), Hierax (“Hawk”), Physcon (“Pot-belly”), Lathyrus (“Chick-pea”).

The armies of Alexander’s successors were still in the main principles of their organization similar to the army with which Alexander had conquered Asia. During the years immediately after Alexander the very Macedonians who had fought 10. Armies. under Alexander were ranged against each other under the banners of the several chiefs. The most noted corps of veterans, Argyraspides (i.e. the royal Hypaspistae) played a great part in the first wars of the successors, and covered themselves with infamy by their betrayal of Eumenes. As the soldiers of Alexander died off, fresh levies of home-born Macedonians could be raised only by the chief who held the motherland. The other chiefs had to supply themselves with Macedonians from the numerous colonies planted before the break-up of the empire in Asia or Egypt, and from such Macedonians they continued for the next two centuries to form their phalanx. The breed—at least if the statement which Livy puts into the mouth of a Roman general can be relied on—degenerated greatly under Asiatic and Egyptian skies (Liv. xxxviii. 17, 10); but still old names like that of pezetaeri attached to the phalangites (Plut. Tib. 17), and they still wielded the national sarissa. The latter weapon in the interval between Alexander and the time of Polybius had been increased to a length of 21 ft. (Polyb. xviii. 12), a proportion inconsistent with any degree of mobility; once more indeed the phalanx of the 2nd century seems to have become a body effective by sheer weight only and disordered by unevenness of ground. The Antigonid kings were never able from Macedonian levies to put in the field a phalanx of more than 20,000 at the utmost (Liv. xlii. 51); Antigonus Doson takes with him to Greece (in 222) one of 10,000 only. The phalanx of Antiochus III. at Raphia numbered 20,000, and Ptolemy Philopator was able at the same time to form one of 25,000 men (Polyb. v. 4). As these phalangites are distinguished both from the Greek mercenaries and the native Egyptian levies, it looks (although such a fact would be staggering) as if more Macedonians could be raised for military service in Egypt than in Macedonia itself (but see Beloch, p. 353). The royal foot-guards are still described in Macedonia in 171 as the agema (Polyb. v. 25, 1; 27, 3; Liv. xlii. 51), when they number 2000; at the Ptolemaic court in 217 the agema had numbered 3000 (Polyb. v. 65, 2); and a similar corps of hypaspistae is indicated in the Seleucid army (Polyb. vii. 16, 2; xvi. 18, 7). So too the old name of “Companions” was kept up in the Seleucid kingdom for the Macedonian cavalry (see Polyb. v. 53, 4, &c.), and divisions of rank in it are still indicated by the terms agema and royal squadron (βασιλικὴ ἵλη, see Bevan, House of Seleucus, ii. 288). The Antigonid and Seleucid courts had much valuable material at hand for their armies in the barbarian races under their sway. The Balkan hill-peoples of Illyrian or Thracian stock, the hill-peoples of Asia Minor and Iran, the chivalry of Media and Bactria, the mounted bowmen of the Caspian steppes, the camel-riders of the Arabian desert, could all be turned to account. Iranian troops seem to have been employed on a large scale by the earlier Seleucids. At Raphia, Antiochus III. had 10,000 men drawn from the provinces, armed and drilled as Macedonians, and another corps of Iranians numbering 5000 under a native commander (Polyb. v. 79). The experiment of arming the native Egyptians on a large scale does not seem to have been made before the campaign of 217, when Ptolemy IV. formed corps of the Macedonian pattern from Egyptians and Libyans (cf. Polyb. v. 107, 2; Ptolemy I. had employed Egyptians in the army, though chiefly as carriers, Diod. xix. 80, 4). From this time native rebellions in Egypt are recurrent. To the troops drawn from their own dominions the mercenaries which the kings procured from abroad were an important supplement. These were mainly the bands of Greek condottieri, and even for their home-born troops Greek officers of renown were often engaged. The other class of mercenaries were Gauls, and from the time of the Gallic invasion of Asia Minor in 279 Gauls or Galatians were a regular constituent in all armies. They were a weapon apt to be dangerous to the employer, but the terror they inspired was such that every potentate sought to get hold of them. The elephants which Alexander brought back from India were used in the armies of his successors, and in 302 Seleucus procured a new supply. Thenceforward elephants, either brought fresh from India or bred in the royal stables at Apamea, regularly figured in the Seleucid armies. The Ptolemies supplied themselves with this arm from the southern coasts of the Red Sea, where they established stations for the capture and shipping of elephants, but the African variety was held inferior to the Indian. Scythed chariots such as had figured in the old Persian armies were still used by the Greek masters of Asia (Seleucus I., Diod. xx. 113, 4; Molon, Polyb. v. 53, 10; Antiochus III., Liv. xxxvii. 41), at any rate till the battle of Magnesia. The Hellenistic armies were distinguished by their external magnificence. They made a greater display of brilliant metal and gorgeous colour than the Roman armies, for instance. The description given by Justin of the army which Antiochus Sidetes took to the East in 130 B.C., boot-nails and bridles of gold, gives an idea of their standard of splendour (Just. xxxviii. 10, 1; cf. Polyb. xxxi. 3; Plut. Eum. 14; id. Aemil. 18; id. Sulla, 16).

During the 3rd century B.C. Egypt was the greatest sea power of the eastern Mediterranean, and maintained a large fleet (the figures in App. Prooem, 10 are not trustworthy, see Beloch III. [i.], 364). Its control of the Aegean was, however, contested not without success by the Antigonids, who won the two great sea-fights of Cos (c. 256) and Andros (227), and wrested the overlordship of the Cyclades from the Ptolemies. Of the numbers and constitution of the Antigonid fleet we know nothing.7 At the Seleucid court in 222 the admiral (ναύαρχος) appears as a person of high consideration (Polyb. v. 43, 1); in his war with Rome Antiochus III. had 107 decked battleships on the sea at one time. By the Peace of Apamea (188) the Seleucid navy was abolished; Antiochus undertook to keep no more than 10 ships of war.

For the Hellenistic armies and fleets see A. Bauer in L. von Müller’s Handbuch, vol. iv.; Delbrück, Gesch. d. Kriegskunst (1900).

To their native subjects the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings were always foreigners. It was considered wonderful in the last Cleopatra that she learnt to speak Egyptian (Plut. Anton. 27). Natives were employed, as we have 11. Treatment of Subject Peoples. seen, in the army, and Iranians are found under the Seleucids holding high commands, e.g. Aspasianus the Mede (Polyb. v. 79, 7), Aribazus, governor of Cilicia (Flinders Petrie, Papyri, II., No. 45), Aribazus, governor of Sardis (Polyb. vii. 17, 9), and Omanes (Michel, No. 19, l. 104). Native cults the Hellenistic kings thought it good policy to patronize. Antiochus I. began rebuilding the temple of Nebo at Borsippa (Keilinschr. Bibl. iii. 2, 136 seq.) Antiochus III. bestowed favours on the Temple at Jerusalem. Even if the documents in Joseph, Arch. xii. §§ 138 seq. are spurious, their general view of the relation of Antiochus III. and Jerusalem is probably true. Even small local worships, like that of the village of Baetocaece, might secure royal patronage (C.I.G. No. 4474). Of course, financial straits might drive the kings to lay hands on temple-treasures, as Antiochus III. and Antiochus IV. did, but that was a measure of emergency.

The Macedonian kingdoms, strained by continual wars, increasingly divided against themselves, falling often under the sway of prodigals and debauchees, were far from realizing the Hellenic idea of sound government 12. Significance of Macedonian Rule. as against the crude barbaric despotisms of the older East. Yet, in spite of all corruption, ideas of the intelligent development of the subject lands, visions of the Hellenic king, as the Greek thinkers had come to picture him, haunted the Macedonian rulers, and perhaps fitfully, in the intervals of war or carousal, prompted some degree of action. Treatises “Concerning Kingship” were produced as a regular thing by philosophers, and kings who claimed the fine flower of Hellenism, could not but peruse them. Strabo regards the loss of the eastern provinces to the Parthians as their passage under a government of lower type, beyond the sphere of Hellenic ἐπιμέγεια (Strabo xi. 509). In the organization of the administrative machinery of these kingdoms, the higher power of the Hellene to adapt and combine had been operative; they were organisms of a richer, more complex type than the East had hitherto known. It was thus that when Rome became a world-empire, it found to some extent the forms of government ready made, and took over from the Hellenistic monarchies a tradition which it handed on to the later world.

Authorities.—For the general history of the Macedonian kingdoms, see Droysen, Histoire de l’Hellénisme (the French translation by Bouché-Leclercq, 1883-1885, represents the work in its final revision); A. Holm, History of Greece, vol. iv. (1894); B. Niese, Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten (1893-1903); Kaerst, Gesch. des hellenist. Zeitalters, vol. i. (1901). A masterly conspectus of the general character of the Hellenistic kingdoms in their political, economic and social character, their artistic and intellectual culture is given by Beloch, Griech. Gesch. iii. (i.), 260-556; see also Kaerst, Studien zur Entwicklung d. Monarchie; E. Breccia, Il Diritto dinastico helle monarchie dei successori d’Alessandro Magno (1903). Popular sketches of the history, enlightened by special knowledge and a wide outlook, are given by J. P. Mahaffy, Alexander’s Empire (“Stories of the Nations Series”); Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire (1905); The Silver Age of the Greek World (1906). See also Hellenism; Ptolemies; Seleucid Dynasty.

(E. R. B.)

1 For the events which brought this empire into being see Alexander the Great. For the detailed accounts of the separate dynasties into which it was divided after Alexander’s death, see Seleucid Dynasty, Antigonus, Pergamum, &c., and for its effect on the spread of Hellenic culture see Hellenism.

2 For details see separate articles on the chief generals.

3 For Ptolemaic Egypt, see Ptolemies and Egypt.

4 A tenth of the produce is suggested to have been the normal tax by what the Romans found obtaining in the Attalid kingdom. The references given by Beloch (Griech. Gesch. iii. [i.], p. 343) to prove it for the Seleucid kingdom are questionable. Beloch refers (1) to the letter of Demetrius II. to Lasthenes in which δεκαταὶ καὶ τὰ τέλη are mentioned, 1 Macc. 11, 35 (Beloch, by an oversight, refers to the paraphrase of the documents in Joseph. Ant. xiii. 4, § 126 seq., in which the mention of the δεκαταί is omitted!). The authenticity of this document is, however, very doubtful. He refers (2) to Dittenb. 171 (1st ed.), line 101; but here the tax seems to be, not an imperial one, but one paid to the city of Smyrna.

5 The salt monopoly is mentioned in 1 Macc. 10, 29; 11, 35, a suspected source, but supported in this detail by the analogy of Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome. For domains in Antigonid, Attalid and Bithynian realms, see Cic. De leg. agr. ii. 19, 50.

6 Antiochus Epiphanes was an extreme case. For the Antigonid court see Diog. Laërt. vii. 13; Plut. Arat. 17; for the Seleucid, Athen. iv. 155b; v. 211a; for the Ptolemaic, Diog. L. vii. 177; Athen. vi. 246c; Plut. Cleom. 33; Just. xxx. 1.

7 For the Antigonid ναύαρχος or admiral, see Polyb. xvi. 6.

MACEDONIUS, (1) bishop of Constantinople in succession to Eusebius of Nicomedia, was elected by the Arian bishops in 341, while the orthodox party elected Paul, whom Eusebius had superseded. The partisans of the two rivals involved the city in a tumultuous broil, and were not quelled until the emperor Constantius II. banished Paul. Macedonius was recognized as patriarch in 342. Compelled by the intervention of Constans in 348 to resign the patriarchate in favour of his former opponent, he was reinstalled in 350. He then took vengeance on his opponents by a general persecution of the adherents of the Nicene Creed. In 359, on the division of the Arian party into Acacians (or pure Arians) and semi-Arians or Homoiousians, Macedonius adhered to the latter, and in consequence was expelled from his see by the council of Constantinople in 360. He now became avowed leader of the sect of Pneumatomachi, Macedonians or Marathonians, whose distinctive tenet was that the Holy Spirit is but a being similar to the angels, subordinate to and in the service of the Father and the Son, the relation between whom did not admit of a third. He did not long survive his deposition.

See the Church Histories of Socrates and Sozomen; Art. in Dict. Chr. Biog.; F. Loofs in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyk.; H. M. Gwatkin, Arianism.

Macedonius, (2) bishop of Mopsuestia, was present at the councils of Nicaea and Philippopolis, and inclined to the reactionary party who thought the Athanasians had gone too far.

Macedonius, (3) bishop of Constantinople (fl. 510), a strict Chalcedonian who vainly opposed the fanaticism of the monophysite Severus and was deposed in 513.

MACEIÓ or Maçayó, a city and port of Brazil and capital of the state of Alagôas, about 125 m. S.S.W. of Pernambuco, in lat. 9° 39′ 35″ S., long. 35° 44′ 36″ W. Pop. including a large rural district and several villages (1890), 31,498; (1908, estimate), 33,000. The city stands at the foot of low bluffs, about a mile from the shore line. The water-side village of Jaraguá, the port of Maceió, is practically a suburb of the city. South of the port is the shallow entrance to the Lagôa do Norte, of Lagôa Mundahú, a salt-water lake extending inland for some miles. Maceió is attractively situated in the midst of large plantations of coco-nut and dendé palms, though the broad sandy beach in front and the open sun-burned plain behind give a barren character to its surroundings. The heat is moderated by the S.E. trade winds, and the city is considered healthful. The public buildings are mostly constructed of broken stone and mortar, plastered outside and covered with red tiles, but the common dwellings are generally constructed of tapia—rough trellis-work walls filled in with mud. A light tramway connects the city and port, and a railway—the Alagôas Central—connects the two with various interior towns. The port is formed by a stone reef running parallel with and a half-mile from the shore line, within which vessels of light draft find a safe anchorage, except from southerly gales. Ocean-going steamers anchor outside the reef. The exports consist principally of sugar, cotton, and rum (aguardiente). Maceió dates from 1815 when a small settlement there was created a “villa.” In 1839 it became the provincial capital and was made a city by the provincial assembly.

McENTEE, JERVIS (1828-1891), American artist, was born at Rondout, New York, on the 14th of July 1828, and was a pupil of Frederick E. Church. He was made an associate of the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1860, and a full academician in 1861. In 1869 he visited Europe, painting much in Italy. He was identified with the Hudson River School, and excelled in pictures of autumn scenery. He died at Rondout, N.Y., on the 27th of January 1891.

MACER, AEMILIUS, of Verona, Roman didactic poet, author of two poems, one on birds (Ornithogonia), the other on the antidotes against the poison of serpents (Theriaca), imitated from the Greek poet Nicander of Colophon. According to Jerome, he died in 16 B.C. It is possible that he wrote also a botanical work. The extant hexameter poem De viribus (or virtutibus) herbarum, ascribed to Macer, is a medieval production by Odo Magdunensis, a French physician. Aemilius Macer must be distinguished from the Macer called Iliacus in the Ovidian catalogue of poets, the author of an epic poem on the events preceding the opening of the Iliad. The fact of his being addressed by Ovid in one of the epistles Ex Ponto shows that he was alive long after Aemilius Macer. He had been identified with the son or grandson of Theophanes of Mytilene, the intimate friend of Pompey.

See Ovid, Tristia, iv. 10, 43; Quintilian, Instit. x. 1, 56, 87; R. Unger, De Macro Nicandri imitatore (Friedland, 1845); C. P. Schulze in Rheinisches Museum (1898), liii. p. 541; for Macer Iliacus see Ovid, Ex Ponto, ii 10, 13, iv. 16, 6; Amores, ii. 18.

MACERATA, a city of the Marches, Italy, the chief town of the province of Macerata and a bishop’s see, 44 m. by rail S. of Ancona. Pop. (1901), 6,176 (town), 22,473 (commune). Crowning a hill 919 ft. above sea-level, with a picturesque mass of buildings enclosed by walls and towers, Macerata looks out over the Adriatic. The cathedral is modern, but some of the churches and palaces are not without interest. Besides the university, agricultural school and industrial institute, Macerata has a communal library founded by Leo XII., containing a small but choice collection of early pictures, and in the municipal buildings, a collection of antiquities from Helvia Ricina. There is an enormous amphitheatre or sferisterio for pallone, a ball game which is very popular in the district. The industries comprise the making of bricks, matches, terra-cotta and chemicals.

Macerata, as well as Recanati, was founded by the inhabitants of Ricina after the destruction of their city by Alaric in 408. During the Lombard period it was a flourishing town; but it was raised from comparative insignificance by Nicholas IV. to be the seat of the governors of the March. It was enclosed in the 13th century by a new line of walls more than 2½ m. in circuit; and in the troubles of the next two hundred years it had frequent occasion to learn their value. For the most part it remained faithful to the popes, and in return it was rewarded by a multitude of privileges. Though in 1797 the inhabitants opened their gates to the French, two years afterwards, when the country people took refuge within the walls, the city was taken by storm and delivered to pillage. The bishopric of Macerata dates from the suppression of the see of Recanati (1320).

MACFARREN, SIR GEORGE ALEXANDER (1813-1887), English composer, was born in London on the 2nd of March 1813, and entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1829. A symphony by him was played at an Academy concert in 1830; for the opening of the Queen’s Theatre in Tottenham Street, under the management of his father, in 1831, he wrote an overture. His Chevy Chase overture, the orchestral work by which he is perhaps best known, was written as early as 1836, and in a single night. On leaving the Academy in 1836, Macfarren was for about a year a music teacher in the Isle of Man, and wrote two unsuccessful operas. In 1837 he was appointed a professor at the Academy, and wrote his Romeo and Juliet overture. In the following year he brought out The Devil’s Opera, one of his best works. In 1843 he became conductor at Covent Garden, producing the Antigone with Mendelssohn’s music; his opera on Don Quixote was produced under Bunn at Drury Lane in 1846; his subsequent operas include Charles II. (1849), Robin Hood (1860), She Stoops to Conquer (1864), and Helvellyn (1864). A gradual failure of his eyesight, which had been defective from boyhood, resulted in total blindness in 1865, but he overcame the difficulties by employing an amanuensis in composition, and made hardly a break in the course of his work. He was made principal of the Royal Academy of Music in succession to Sterndale Bennett in February 1875, and in March of the same year professor of music in Cambridge University. Shortly before this he had begun a series of oratorios: St John the Baptist (Bristol, 1873); Resurrection (Birmingham, 1876); Joseph (Leeds, 1877); and King David (Leeds, 1883). In spite of their solid workmanship, and the skill with which the ideas are treated, it is difficult to hear or read them through without smiling at some of the touches of quite unconscious humour often resulting from the way in which the Biblical narratives have been, as it were, dramatized. He delivered many lectures of great and lasting value, and his theoretical works, such as the Rudiments of Harmony, and the treatise on counterpoint, will probably be remembered longer than many of his compositions. He was knighted in 1883, and died suddenly in London on the 31st of October 1887.

An excellent memoir by H. C. Banister appeared in 1891.

McGEE, THOMAS D’ARCY (1825-1868), Irish-Canadian politician and writer, second son of James McGee, a coast-guard, was born at Carlingford, Co. Louth, on the 13th of April 1825. He early showed a remarkable aptitude for oratory. At the age of thirteen he delivered a speech at Wexford, and when four years later he emigrated to America he quickly gained a reputation as a writer and public speaker in the city of Boston. He thus attracted the attention of O’Connell, and before he was twenty years of age he returned to London to become parliamentary correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal, and shortly afterwards London correspondent of the Nation, to which he also contributed a number of poems. He married in 1847 Mary Theresa Caffry, by whom he had two children. In 1846 he became one of the moving spirits in the “Young Ireland” party, and in promoting the objects of that organization he contributed two volumes to the “Library of Ireland.” On the failure of the movement in 1848 McGee escaped in the disguise of a priest to the United States, where between 1848 and 1853 he established two newspapers, the New York Nation and the American Celt. His writings at first were exceedingly bitter and anti-English; but as years passed he realized that a greater measure of political freedom was possible under the British constitution than under the American. He had now become well-known as an author, and as a lecturer of unusual ability. In 1857 McGee, driven from the United States by the scurrilous attacks of the extreme Irish revolutionaries, took up his abode in Canada, and was admitted to the bar of the province of Lower Canada in 1861. At the general election in 1858 he was returned to parliament as the member for Montreal, and for four years he was regarded as a powerful factor in the house. On the formation of the Sandfield-Macdonald-Sicotte administration in 1862 he accepted the office of president of the council. When the cabinet was reconstructed a year later the Irish were left without representation, and McGee sought re-election as a member of the opposite party. In 1864 he was appointed minister of agriculture in the administration of Sir E. P. Taché, and he served the country in that capacity until his death. He actively supported the policy of federation and was elected a member of the first Dominion parliament in 1867. On the 7th of April 1868, after having delivered a notable speech in the house, he was shot by an assassin as he was about to enter his house at Ottawa. His utterances against the Fenian invasion are believed to have been the cause of the crime for which P. J. Whelan was executed. McGee’s loss was keenly felt by all classes, and within a few weeks of his death parliament granted an annuity to his widow and children. McGee had great faith in the future of Canada as a part of the empire. Speaking at St John, N.B., in 1863, he said: “There are before the public men of British America at this moment but two courses: either to drift with the tide of democracy, or to seize the golden moment and fix for ever the monarchical character of our institutions. I invite every fellow colonist who agrees with me to unite our efforts that we may give our province the aspect of an empire, in order to exercise the influence abroad and at home of a state, and to originate a history which the world will not willingly let die.” Sir Charles Gavan Duffy considered that as a poet McGee was not inferior to Davis, and that as an orator he possessed powers rarer than those of T. F. Meagher.

McGee’s principal works are: A Popular History of Ireland (2 vols., New York, 1862; 1 vol., London, 1869); Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 1846); Historical Sketches of O’Connell and his Friends (Boston, 1844); Memoirs of the Life and Conquests of Art McMurrogh, King of Leinster (Dublin, 1847); Memoir of C. G. Duffy (Dublin, 1849); A History of the Irish Settlers in North America (Boston, 1851); History of the Attempts to establish the Protestant Reformation in Ireland (Boston, 1853); Life of Edward Maginn, Coadjutor Bishop of Derry (New York, 1857); Catholic History of North America (Boston, 1854); Canadian Ballads and Occasional Pieces (New York, 1858); Notes on Federal Governments Past and Present (Montreal, 1865); Speeches and Addresses, chiefly on the Subject of the British American Union (London, 1865); Poems, edited by Mrs M. A. Sadleir with introductory memoir (New York, 1869). See Fennings Taylor, The Hon. Thomas D’Arcy McGee (Montreal, 1867); J. K. Foran, Thomas D’Arcy McGee as an Empire Builder (Ottawa, 1904); H. J. O’C. French, A Sketch of the Life of the Hon. T. D. McGee (Montreal); Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography., iv. 116; N. F. Dvin’s Irishman in Canada (1887); C. G. Duffy, Four Years of Irish History (1883); Alfred Webb, Compendium of Irish Biography (Dublin, 1878).

(A. G. D.)

McGIFFERT, ARTHUR CUSHMAN (1861- ), American theologian, was born in Sauquoit, New York, on the 4th of March 1861, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman of Scotch descent. He graduated at Western Reserve College in 1882 and at Union theological seminary in 1885, studied in Germany (especially under Harnack) in 1885-1887, and in Italy and France in 1888, and in that year received the degree of doctor of philosophy at Marburg. He was instructor (1888-1890) and professor (1890-1893) of church history at Lane theological seminary, and in 1893 became Washburn professor of church history in Union theological seminary, succeeding Dr Philip Schaff. His published work, except occasional critical studies in philosophy, dealt with church history and the history of dogma. His best known publication is a History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age (1897). This book, by its independent criticism and departures from traditionalism, aroused the opposition of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church; though the charges brought against McGiffert were dismissed by the Presbytery of New York, to which they had been referred, a trial for heresy seemed inevitable, and McGiffert, in 1900, retired from the Presbyterian ministry and entered the Congregational Church, although he retained his position in Union theological seminary. Among his other publications are: A Dialogue between a Christian and a Jew (1888); a translation (with introduction and notes) of Eusebius’s Church History (1890); and The Apostles’ Creed (1902), in which he attempted to prove that the old Roman creed was formulated as a protest against the dualism of Marcion and his denial of the reality of Jesus’s life on earth.

McGILLIVRAY, ALEXANDER (c. 1730-1793), American Indian chief, was born near the site of the present Wetumpka, in Alabama. His father was a Scotch merchant and his mother the daughter of a French officer and an Indian “princess.” Through his father’s relatives in South Carolina, McGillivray received a good education, but at the age of seventeen, after a short experience as a merchant in Savannah and Pensacola, he returned to the Muscogee Indians, who elected him chief. He retained his connexion with business life as a member of the British firm of Panton, Forbes & Leslie of Pensacola. During the War of Independence, as a colonel in the British army, he incited his followers to attack the western frontiers of Georgia and the Carolinas. Georgia confiscated some of his property, and after the peace of 1783 McGillivray remained hostile. Though still retaining his British commission, he accepted one from Spain, and during the remainder of his life used his influence to prevent American settlement in the south-west. So important was he considered that in 1790 President Washington sent an agent who induced him to visit New York. Here he was persuaded to make peace in consideration of a brigadier-general’s commission and payment for the property confiscated by Georgia; and with the warriors who accompanied him he signed a formal treaty of peace and friendship on the 7th of August. He then went back to the Indian country, and remained hostile to the Americans until his death. He was one of the ablest Indian leaders of America and at one time wielded great power—having 5000 to 10,000 armed followers. In order to serve Indian interests he played off British, Spanish and American interests against one another, but before he died he saw that he was fighting in a losing cause, and, changing his policy, endeavoured to provide for the training of the Muscogees in the white man’s civilization. McGillivray was polished in manners, of cultivated intellect, was a shrewd merchant, and a successful speculator; but he had many savage traits, being noted for his treachery, craftiness and love of barbaric display.

(W. L. F.)

MACGILLIVRAY, WILLIAM (1796-1852), Scottish naturalist, was born at Aberdeen on the 25th of January 1796. At King’s College, Aberdeen, he graduated in 1815, and also studied medicine, but did not complete the latter course. In 1823 he became assistant to R. Jameson, professor of natural history in Edinburgh University; and in 1831 he was appointed curator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, a post which he resigned in 1841 to become professor of natural history and lecturer on botany in Marischal College, Aberdeen. He died at Aberdeen on the 4th of September 1852. He possessed a wide and comprehensive knowledge of natural science, gained no less from personal observations in different parts of Scotland than from a study of collections and books. His industry and extensive knowledge are amply shown in his published works. He assisted J. J. Audubon in his classical works on the Birds of America, and edited W. Withering’s British Plants. His larger works include biographies of A. von Humboldt, and of zoologists from Aristotle to Linnaeus, a History of British Quadrupeds, a History of the Molluscous Animals of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine, a Manual of British Ornithology, and a History of British Birds, in 5 vols. (1837-1852). The last work holds a high rank from the excellent descriptions of the structure, habits and haunts of birds, and from the use in classification of characters afforded by their anatomical structure. His Natural History of Deeside, posthumously published by command of Queen Victoria, was the result of a sojourn in the highlands of Aberdeenshire in 1850. He made large collections, alike for the instruction of his students and to illustrate the zoology, botany and geology of the parts of Scotland examined by him, especially around Aberdeen, and a number of his original water-colour drawings are preserved in the British Museum (Natural History).

His eldest son, John Macgillivray (1822-1867), published an account of the voyage round the world of H.M.S. “Rattlesnake,” on board of which he was naturalist. Another son, Paul, published an Aberdeen Flora in 1853.

MacGREGOR, JOHN [”Rob Roy”] (1825-1892), Scottish canoeist, traveller and philanthropist, son of General Sir Duncan MacGregor, K.C.B., was born at Gravesend on the 24th of January 1825. He combined a roving disposition with a natural taste for mechanics and for literature. In 1839 he went to Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1844 to Trinity, Cambridge, where he was a wrangler. He was called to the bar in 1851, but did not pursue his profession. He travelled a great deal in Europe, Egypt, Palestine, Russia, Algeria and America, and between 1853 and 1863 was largely occupied with researches into the history and methods of marine propulsion. He was the pioneer of British canoeing. In 1865 he started on a long canoeing cruise in his “Rob Roy” canoe, and in this way made a prolonged water tour through Europe, a record of which he published in 1866 as A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe. This book made MacGregor and his canoe famous. He made similar voyages in later years in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the North Sea and Palestine. Another voyage, in the English Channel and on French waters, was made in a yawl. He published accounts of all these journeys. He did not, however, confine his energies to travelling. He was active in charity and philanthropic work, being one of the founders of the Shoe-black Brigade. In 1870 and again in 1873 he was elected on the London school board. He died at Boscombe on the 16th of July 1892.

MACH, ERNST (1838- ), Austrian physicist and psychologist, was born on the 18th of February 1838 at Turas in Moravia, and studied at Vienna. He was professor of mathematics at Gratz (1864-1867), of physics at Prague (1867-1895), and of physics at Vienna (1895-1901). In 1879 and 1880 as Rector Magnificus he fought against the introduction of Czech instead of German in the Prague University. In 1901 he was made a member of the Austrian house of peers. In philosophy he began with a strong predilection for the physical side of psychology, and at an early age he came to the conclusion that all existence is sensation, and, after a lapse into noümenalism under the influence of Fechner’s Psychophysics, finally adopted a universal physical phenomenalism. The Ego he considers not an entity sharply distinguished from the Non-ego, but merely, as it were, a medium of continuity of sensory impressions. His whole theory appears to be vitiated by the confusion of physics and psychology.

Works.—Kompendium der Physik für Mediziner (Vienna, 1863); Einleitung in die Heimholtz’sehe Musiktheorie (Gratz, 1866); Die Gesch. u. d. Wurzel d. Satzes von d. Erhaltung d. Arbeit (Prague, 1872); Grundlinien d. Lehre v. d. Bewegungsempfindungen (Leipzig, 1875); Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung (Leipzig, 1883; rev. ed., 1908; Eng. trans., T. J. McCormack, 1902); Beiträge zur Analyse d. Empfindungen (Jena, 1886), 5th ed., 1906, entitled Die Analyse d. Empfindungen; Leitfaden d. Physik für Studierende (Prague, 1881, in collaboration); Populärwissenschaftliche Vorlesungen (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1903); Die Prinzipien d. Wärmelehre (2nd ed., 1900); Erkenntnis und Irrtum (Leipzig, 1905).

MACHAERODUS, or Machairodus, the typical genus of a group of long-tusked extinct cats, commonly known as sabre-tooths. Although best regarded as a sub-family (Machaerodontinae) of the Felidae, they are sometimes referred to a separate family under the name Nimravidae (see Carnivora). The later forms, as well as some of the earlier ones, are more specialized as regards dentition than the modern Felidae, although in several other respects they exhibit more primitive features. The general type of dentition is feline, but in some instances more premolars are retained, as well as a small tubercular molar behind the lower carnassial. The characteristic feature is, however, the great development of the upper canines, which in the more specialized types reach far below the margin of the lower jaw, despite the development of a flange-like expansion of the extremity of the latter for their protection. In these extreme forms it is quite evident that the jaws could not be used in the ordinary manner; and it seems probable that in attacking prey the lower jaw was dropped to a vertical position, and the huge upper tusks used as stabbing instruments. The group is believed to be derived from a creodont allied to the Eocene Palaeonictis (see Creodonta).

Nimravus, of the American Oligocene, with two premolars and two molars in the lower jaw, and comparatively short upper canines, seems to be the least specialized type; next to which comes Hoplophoneus, another North American Oligocene genus, in which the tubercular lower molar is lost, and the upper canine is longer. It is noteworthy, however, that this genus retains the third trochanter to the femur, which is lost in Nimravus. Machaerodus, in the wider sense, includes the larger and more typical forms. In the Pliocene of France and Italy it is represented by M. megantereon, a species not larger than a leopard, and allied forms occur in the Pliocene of Greece, Hungary, Samos, Persia, India and China, as well as in the Middle Miocene of France and Germany. Far larger is the Pleistocene M. cultridens of the caverns of Europe, with serrated upper tusks several inches in length. From Europe and Asia the sabre-toothed tigers may be traced into North and thence into South America, the home of M. (Smilodon) neogaeus, the largest of the whole tribe, whose remains occur in the Brazilian caves and the silt of the Argentine pampas. This animal was as large as a tiger, with tusks projecting seven inches from the jaw and very complex carnassials; the feet were very short, with only four toes to the hind-pair, and the humerus has lost the foramen at the lower end. Very noteworthy is the occurrence of an imperfectly known specialized type—Eusmilus—in the Lower Oligocene of Europe and perhaps also North America. Unlike all other cats, it had only two pairs of lower incisors, and the large cheek-teeth were reduced to the carnassial and one premolar in advance of the same.

(R. L.*)

MACHALE, JOHN (1791-1881), Irish divine, was born on the 15th of March 1791 at Tuber-na-Fian, Mayo, and was educated at Maynooth, where after graduating in 1814 he was ordained priest and appointed lecturer in theology, succeeding to the professoriate in 1820. In 1825 he became coadjutor bishop of Killala, and in July 1834 archbishop of Tuam and metropolitan. He visited Rome in 1831, and was there again at the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (Dec. 1854) and in 1869-1870 at the Vatican council. Though he did not favour the dogma of Papal Infallibility he submitted as soon as it was defined. Machale was an intensely patriotic Irishman, who fought hard for Catholic Emancipation, for separate Roman Catholic schools, and against the Queen’s Colleges. He translated part of the Iliad (Dublin, 1861), and made an Irish version of some of Moore’s melodies and of the Pentateuch. He died at Tuam on the 7th of November 1881.

MACHAULT D’ARNOUVILLE, JEAN BAPTISTE DE (1701-1794), French statesman, was a son of Louis Charles Machault d’Arnouville, lieutenant of police. In 1721 he was counsel to the parlement of Paris, in 1728 maître des requêtes, and ten years later was made president of the Great Council; although he had opposed the court in the Unigenitus dispute, he was appointed intendant of Hainaut in 1743. From this position, through the influence at court of his old friend René Louis, Marquis d’Argenson, he was called to succeed Orry de Fulvy as controller-general of the finances in December 1745. He found, on taking office, that in the four years of the War of the Austrian Succession the economies of Cardinal Fleury had been exhausted, and he was forced to develop the system of borrowings which was bringing French finances to bankruptcy. He attempted in 1749 a reform in the levying of direct taxes, which, if carried out, would have done much to prevent the later Revolutionary movement. He proposed to abolish the old tax of a tenth, which was evaded by the clergy and most of the nobility, and substitute a tax of one-twentieth which should be levied on all without exception. The cry for exceptions, however, began at once. The clergy stood in a body by their historical privileges, and the outcry of the nobility was too great for the minister to make headway against. Still he managed to retain his office until July 1754, when he exchanged the controllership for the ministry of marine. Foreseeing the disastrous results of the alliance with Austria, he was drawn to oppose more decidedly the schemes of Mme de Pompadour, whose personal ill-will he had gained. Louis XV. acquiesced in her demand for his disgrace on the 1st of February 1757. Machault lived on his estate at Arnouville until the Revolution broke out, when, after a period of hiding, he was apprehended in 1794 at Rouen and brought to Paris as a suspect. He was imprisoned in the Madelonnettes, where he succumbed in a few weeks, at the age of ninety-three.

His son, Louis Charles Machault d’Arnouville (1737-1820), was bishop of Amiens from 1774 until the Revolution. He was famous for his charity; but proved to be a most uncompromising Conservative at the estates general of 1789, where he voted consistently against every reform. He emigrated in 1791, resigned his bishopric in 1801 to facilitate the concordat, and retired to the ancestral château of Arnouville, where he died in 1820.

MACHAUT, GUILLAUME DE (c. 1300-1377), French poet and musician, was born in the village of Machault near Réthel in Champagne. Machaut tells us that he served for thirty years the adventurous John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia. He followed his master to Russia and Poland, and, though of peaceful tastes himself, saw twenty battles and a hundred tourneys. When John was killed at Crécy in 1346 Machaut was received at the court of Normandy, and on the accession of John the Good to the throne of France (1350) he received an office which enabled him to devote himself thenceforth to music and poetry. Machaut wrote about 1348 in honour of Charles III., king of Navarre, a long poem much admired by contemporaries, Le Jugement du roi de Navarre. When Charles was thrown into prison by his father-in-law, King John, Machaut addressed him a Confort d’ami to console him for his enforced separation from his young wife, then aged fifteen. This was followed about 1370 by a poem of 9000 lines entitled La Prise d’Alexandrie, one of the last chronicles cast in this form. Its hero was Pierre de Lusignan, king of Cyprus. Machaut is best known for the strange book telling of the love affair of his old age with a young and noble lady long supposed to be Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad; Paulin Paris in his edition of the Voir dit (Historie vraie) identified her as Perronne d’Armentières, a noble lady of Champagne. In 1362, when Machaut must have been at least sixty-two years of age, he received a rondeau from Perronne, who was then eighteen, expressing her devotion. She no doubt wished to play Laura to his Petrarch, and the Voir dit contains the correspondence and the poems which they exchanged. The romance, which ended with Perronne’s marriage and Machaut’s desire to remain her doux ami, has gleams of poetry, especially in Perronne’s verses, but its subject and its length are both deterrent to modern readers. But Machaut with Deschamps marks a distinct transition. The trouvères had been impersonal. It is difficult to gather any details of their personal history from their work. Machaut and Deschamps wrote of their own affairs, and the next step in development was to be the self-analysis of Villon. Machaut was also a musician. He composed a number of motets, songs and ballads, also a mass supposed to have been sung at the coronation of Charles V. This was translated into modern notation by Perne, who read a notice on it before the Institute of France in 1817.

Machaut’s Oeuvres choisies were edited by P. Tarbé (Rheims and Paris, 1849); La Prise d’Alexandrie, by L. de Mas-Latrie (Geneva, 1877); and Le Livre du voir-dit, by Paulin Paris (1875). See also F. G. Fétis, Biog. universelle des musiciens ... (Paris, 1862), and a notice on the Instruments de musique au xive siècle d’après Guillaume de Machaut, by E. Travers (Paris, 1882).

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469-1527), Italian statesman and writer, was born at Florence on the 3rd of May 1469. His ancestry claimed blood relationship with the lords of Montespertoli, a fief situated between Val di Pesa and Val d’Elsa, at no great distance from the city. Niccolò’s father, Bernardo (b. 1428), followed the profession of a jurist. He held landed property worth something like £250 a year of our money. His son, though not wealthy, was never wholly dependent upon official income.

Of Niccolò’s early years and education little is known. His works show wide reading in the Latin and Italian classics, but it is almost certain that he had not mastered the Greek language. To the defects of Machiavelli’s education we may, in part at least, ascribe the peculiar vigour of his style and his speculative originality. He is free from the scholastic trifling and learned frivolity which tainted the rhetorical culture of his century. He made the world of men and things his study, learned to write his mother-tongue with idiomatic conciseness, and nourished his imagination on the masterpieces of the Romans.

The year of Charles VIII.’s invasion and of the Medici’s expulsion from Florence (1494) saw Machiavelli’s first entrance into public life. He was appointed clerk in the second chancery of the commune under his old master, the grammarian, Marcello Virgilio Adriani. Early in 1498 Adriani became chancellor of the republic, and Machiavelli received his vacated office with the rank of second chancellor and secretary. This post he retained till the year 1512. The masters he had to serve were the dieci di libertà e pace, who, though subordinate to the signoria, exercised a separate control over the departments of war and the interior. They sent their own ambassadors to foreign powers, transacted business with the cities of the Florentine domain, and controlled the military establishment of the commonwealth. The next fourteen years of Machiavelli’s life were fully occupied in the voluminous correspondence of his bureau, in diplomatic missions of varying importance, and in the organization of a Florentine militia. It would be tedious to follow him through all his embassies to petty courts of Italy, the first of which took place in 1499, when he was sent to negotiate the continuance of a loan to Catherine Sforza, countess of Forlì and Imola. In 1500 Machiavelli travelled into France, to deal with Louis XII. about the affairs of Pisa. These embassies were the school in which Machiavelli formed his political opinions, and gathered views regarding the state of Europe and the relative strength of nations. They not only introduced him to the subtleties of Italian diplomacy, but also extended his observation over races very different from the Italians. He thus, in the course of his official business, gradually acquired principles and settled ways of thinking which he afterwards expressed in writing.

In 1502 Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini, who bore him several children, with whom, in spite of his own infidelities, he lived on good terms, and who survived him twenty-six years. In the same year Piero Soderini was chosen gonfalonier for life, in accordance with certain changes in the constitution of the state, which were intended to bring Florence closer to the Venetian type of government. Machiavelli became intimately connected with Soderini, assisted him in carrying out his policy, suggested important measures of military reform which Soderini adopted, and finally was involved in ruin by his fall.

The year 1502 was marked by yet another decisive incident in Machiavelli’s life. In October he was sent, much against his will, as envoy to the camp of Cesare Borgia, duke of Valentinois. The duke was then in Romagna, and it was Machiavelli’s duty to wait upon and watch him. He was able now to observe those intricate intrigues which culminated in Cesare’s murder of his disaffected captains. From what remains of Machiavelli’s official letters, and from his tract upon the Modo che tenne il duca Valentino per ammazzar Vitellozzo Vitelli, we are able to appreciate the actual relations which existed between the two men, and the growth in Machiavelli’s mind of a political ideal based upon his study of the duke’s character. Machiavelli conceived the strongest admiration for Cesare’s combination of audacity with diplomatic prudence, for his adroit use of cruelty and fraud, for his self-reliance, avoidance of half-measures, employment of native troops, and firm administration in conquered provinces. More than once, in letters to his friend Vettori, no less than in the pages of the Principe, Machiavelli afterwards expressed his belief that Cesare Borgia’s behaviour in the conquest of provinces, the cementing of a new state out of scattered elements, and the dealing with false friends or doubtful allies, was worthy of all commendation and of scrupulous imitation. As he watched Cesare Borgia at this, the most brilliant period of his adventurous career, the man became idealized in his reflective but imaginative mind. Round him, as a hero, he allowed his own conceptions of the perfect prince to cluster. That Machiavelli separated the actual Cesare Borgia, whom he afterwards saw, ruined and contemptible, at Rome, from this radiant creature of his political fancy, is probable. That the Cesare of history does not exactly match the Duca Valentino of Machiavelli’s writings is certain. Still the fact remains that henceforth Machiavelli cherished the ideal image of the statesman which he had modelled upon Cesare, and called this by the name of Valentino.

On his return to Florence early in January 1503, Machiavelli began to occupy himself with a project which his recent attendance upon Cesare Borgia had strengthened in his mind. The duties of his office obliged him to study the conditions of military service as they then existed in Italy. He was familiar with the disadvantages under which republics laboured when they engaged professional captains of adventure and levied mercenary troops. The bad faith of the condottiere Paolo Vitelli (beheaded at Florence in 1499) had deeply impressed him. In the war with Pisa he had observed the insubordination and untrustworthiness of soldiers gathered from the dregs of different districts, serving under egotistical and irresponsible commanders. His reading in Livy taught him to admire the Roman system of employing armies raised from the body of the citizens; and Cesare Borgia’s method of gradually substituting the troops of his own duchy for aliens and mercenaries showed him that this plan might be adopted with success by the Italians. He was now determined, if possible, to furnish Florence with a national militia. The gonfalonier Soderini entered into his views. But obstacles of no small magnitude arose. The question of money was immediately pressing. Early in 1503 Machiavelli drew up for Soderini a speech, Discorso sulla provisione del danaro, in which the duty and necessity of liberal expenditure for the protection of the state were expounded upon principles of sound political philosophy. Between this date and the last month of 1506 Machiavelli laboured at his favourite scheme, working out memorials on the subject for his office, and suggesting the outlines of a new military organization. On the 6th of December 1506 his plan was approved by the signoria, and a special ministry, called the nove di ordinanza e milizia, was appointed. Machiavelli immediately became their secretary. The country districts of the Florentine dominion were now divided into departments, and levies of foot soldiers were made in order to secure a standing militia. A commander-in-chief had to be chosen for the new troops. Italian jealousy shrank from conferring this important office on a Florentine, lest one member of the state should acquire a power dangerous to the whole. The choice of Soderini and Machiavelli fell, at this juncture, upon an extremely ineligible person, none other than Don Micheletto, Cesare Borgia’s cut-throat and assassin. It is necessary to insist upon this point, since it serves to illustrate a radical infirmity in Machiavelli’s genius. While forming and promoting his scheme, he was actuated by principles of political wisdom and by the purest patriotism. But he failed to perceive that such a ruffian as Micheletto could not inspire the troops of Florence with that devotion to their country and that healthy moral tone which should distinguish a patriot army. Here, as elsewhere, he revealed his insensibility to the ethical element in human nature.

Meanwhile Italy had been the scene of memorable events, in most of which Machiavelli took some part. Alexander VI. had died suddenly of fever. Julius II. had ascended the papal chair. The duke of Valentinois had been checked in mid-career of conquest. The collapse of the Borgias threw Central Italy into confusion; and Machiavelli had, in 1505, to visit the Baglioni at Perugia and the Petrucci at Siena. In the following year he accompanied Julius upon his march through Perugia into the province of Emilia, where the fiery pope subdued in person the rebellious cities of the Church. Upon these embassies Machiavelli represented the Florentine dieci in quality of envoy. It was his duty to keep the ministry informed by means of frequent despatches and reports. All this while the war for the recovery of Pisa was slowly dragging on, with no success or honour to the Florentines. Machiavelli had to attend the camp and provide for levies amid his many other occupations. And yet he found time for private literary work. In the autumn of 1504 he began his Decennali, or Annals of Italy, a poem composed in rough terza rima. About the same time he composed a comedy on the model of Aristophanes, which is unfortunately lost. It seems to have been called Le Maschere. Giuliano de’ Ricci tells us it was marked by stringent satire upon great ecclesiastics and statesmen, no less than by a tendency to “ascribe all human things to natural causes or to fortune.” That phrase accurately describes the prevalent bias of its author’s mind.

The greater part of 1506 and 1507 was spent in organizing the new militia, corresponding on the subject, and scouring the country on enlistment service. But at the end of the latter year European affairs of no small moment diverted Machiavelli from these humbler duties. Maximilian was planning a journey into Italy in order to be crowned emperor at Rome, and was levying subsidies from the imperial burghs for his expenses. The Florentines thought his demands excessive. Though they already had Francesco Vettori at his court, Soderini judged it advisable to send Machiavelli thither in December. He travelled by Geneva, all through Switzerland, to Botzen, where he found the emperor. This journey was an important moment in his life. It enabled him to study the Swiss and the Germans in their homes; and the report which he wrote on his return is among his most effective political studies. What is most remarkable in it is his concentrated effort to realize the exact political weight of the German nation, and to penetrate the causes of its strength and weakness. He attempts to grasp the national character as a whole, and thence to deduce practical conclusions. The same qualities are noticeable in his Ritratti delle cose di Francia, which he drew up after an embassy to Louis XII. at Blois in 1510. These notes upon the French race are more scattered than the report on German affairs. But they reveal no less acumen combined with imaginative penetration into the very essence of national existence.

Machiavelli returned from Germany in June 1508. The rest of that year and a large part of 1509 were spent in the affairs of the militia and the war of Pisa. Chiefly through his exertions the war was terminated by the surrender of Pisa in June 1509. Meanwhile the league of Cambray had disturbed the peace of Italy, and Florence found herself in a perilous position between Spain and France. Soderini’s government grew weaker. The Medicean party lifted up its head. To the league of Cambray succeeded the Holy League. The battle of Ravenna was fought, and the French retired from Italy. The Florentines had been spectators rather than actors in these great events. But they were now destined to feel the full effects of them. The cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who was present at the battle of Ravenna, brought a Spanish army into Tuscany. Prato was sacked in the August of 1512. Florence, in extreme terror, deposed the gonfalonier, and opened her gates to the princes of the house of Medici.

The government on which Machiavelli depended had fallen, never to rise again. The national militia in which he placed unbounded confidence had proved inefficient to protect Florence in the hour of need. He was surrounded by political and personal enemies, who regarded him with jealousy as the ex-gonfalonier’s right-hand man. Yet at first it appears that he still hoped to retain his office. He showed no repugnance to a change of masters, and began to make overtures to the Medici. The nove della milizia were, however, dissolved; and on the 7th of November 1512 Machiavelli was deprived of his appointments. He was exiled from Florence and confined to the dominion for one year, and on the 17th of November was further prohibited from setting foot in the Palazzo Pubblico. Ruin stared him in the face; and, to make matters worse, he was implicated in the conspiracy of Pier Paolo Boscoli in February 1513. Machiavelli had taken no share in that feeble attempt against the Medici, but his name was found upon a memorandum dropped by Boscoli. This was enough to ensure his imprisonment. He was racked, and only released upon Giovanni de’ Medici’s election to the papacy in March 1513. When he left his dungeon he retired to a farm near San Casciano, and faced the fact that his political career was at an end.

Machiavelli now entered upon a period of life to which we owe the great works that have rendered his name immortal. But it was one of prolonged disappointment and annoyance. He had not accustomed himself to economical living; and, when the emoluments of his office were withdrawn, he had barely enough to support his family. The previous years of his manhood had been spent in continual activity. Much as he enjoyed the study of the Latin and Italian classics, literature was not his business; nor had he looked on writing as more than an occasional amusement. He was now driven in upon his books for the employment of a restless temperament; and to this irksomeness of enforced leisure may be ascribed the production of the Principe, the Discorsi, the Arte della guerra, the comedies, and the Historie fiorentine. The uneasiness of Machiavelli’s mind in the first years of this retirement is brought before us by his private correspondence. The letters to Vettori paint a man of vigorous intellect and feverish activity, dividing his time between studies and vulgar dissipations, seeking at one time distraction in low intrigues and wanton company, at another turning to the great minds of antiquity for solace. It is not easy to understand the spirit in which the author of the Principe sat down to exchange obscenities with the author of the Sommario della storia d’Italia. At the same time this coarseness of taste did not blunt his intellectual sagacity. His letters on public affairs in Italy and Europe, especially those which he meant Vettori to communicate to the Medici at Rome, are marked by extraordinary fineness of perception, combined, as usual in his case, with philosophical breadth. In retirement at his villa near Percussina, a hamlet of San Casciano, Machiavelli completed the Principe before the end of 1513. This famous book is an analysis of the methods whereby an ambitious man may rise to sovereign power. It appears to have grown out of another scarcely less celebrated work, upon which Machiavelli had been engaged before he took the Principe in hand, and which he did not finish until some time afterwards. This second treatise is the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio.

Cast in the form of comments on the history of Livy, the Discorsi are really an inquiry into the genesis and maintenance of states. The Principe is an offshoot from the main theme of the Discorsi, setting forth Machiavelli’s views at large and in detail upon the nature of principalities, the method of cementing them, and the qualities of a successful autocrat. Being more limited in subject and more independent as a work of literary art, this essay detaches itself from the main body of the Discorsi, and has attracted far more attention. We feel that the Principe is inspired with greater fervency, as though its author had more than a speculative aim in view, and brought it forth to serve a special crisis. The moment of its composition was indeed decisive. Machiavelli judged the case of Italy so desperate that salvation could only be expected from the intervention of a powerful despot. The unification of Italy in a state protected by a national army was the cherished dream of his life; and the peroration of the Principe shows that he meant this treatise to have a direct bearing on the problem. We must be careful, however, not to fall into the error of supposing that he wrote it with the sole object of meeting an occasional emergency. Together with the Discorsi, the Principe contains the speculative fruits of his experience and observation combined with his deductions from Roman history. The two works form one coherent body of opinion, not systematically expressed, it is true, but based on the same principles, involving the same conclusions, and directed to the same philosophical end. That end is the analysis of the conception of the state, studied under two main types, republican and monarchical. Up to the date of Machiavelli, modern political philosophy had always presupposed an ideal. Medieval speculation took the Church and the Empire for granted, as divinely appointed institutions, under which the nations of the earth must flourish for the space of man’s probation on this planet. Thinkers differed only as Guelfs and Ghibellines, as leaning on the one side to papal, on the other to imperial supremacy. In the revival of learning, scholarship supplanted scholasticism, and the old ways of medieval thinking were forgotten. But no substantial philosophy of any kind emerged from humanism; the political lucubrations of the scholars were, like their ethical treatises, for the most part rhetorical. Still the humanists effected a delivery of the intellect from what had become the bondage of obsolete ideas, and created a new medium for the speculative faculty. Simultaneously with the revival, Italy had passed into that stage of her existence which has been called the age of despots. The yoke of the Empire had been shaken off. The Church had taken rank among Italian tyrannies. The peninsula was, roughly speaking, divided into principalities and sovereign cities, each of which claimed autocratic jurisdiction. These separate despotisms owned no common social tie, were founded on no common jus or right, but were connected in a network of conflicting interests and changeful diplomatic combinations. A keen and positive political intelligence emerged in the Italian race. The reports of Venetian and Florentine ambassadors at this epoch contain the first germs of an attempt to study politics from the point of view of science.

At this moment Machiavelli intervenes. He was conscious of the change which had come over Italy and Europe. He was aware that the old strongholds of medieval thought must be abandoned, and that the decaying ruins of medieval institutions furnished no basis for the erection of solid political edifices. He felt the corruption of his country, and sought to bring the world back to a lively sense of the necessity for reformation. His originality consists in having extended the positive intelligence of his century from the sphere of contemporary politics and special interests to man at large regarded as a political being. He founded the science of politics for the modern world, by concentrating thought upon its fundamental principles. He began to study men, not according to some preconception, but as he found them—men, not in the isolation of one century, but as a whole in history. He drew his conclusions from the nature of mankind itself, “ascribing all things to natural causes or to fortune.” In this way he restored the right method of study, a method which had been neglected since the days of Aristotle. He formed a conception of the modern state, which marked the close of the middle ages, and anticipated the next phase of European development. His prince, abating those points which are purely Italian or strongly tinctured with the author’s personal peculiarities, prefigured the monarchs of the 16th and 17th centuries, the monarchs whose motto was L’état c’est moi! His doctrine of a national militia foreshadowed the system which has given strength in arms to France and Germany. His insight into the causes of Italian decadence was complete; and the remedies which he suggested, in the perorations of the Principe and the Arte della guerra, have since been applied in the unification of Italy. Lastly, when we once have freed ourselves from the antipathy engendered by his severance of ethics from the field of politics, when we have once made proper allowance for his peculiar use of phrases like frodi onorevoli or scelleratezze gloriose, nothing is left but admiration for his mental attitude. That is the attitude of a patriot, who saw with open eyes the ruin of his country, who burned above all things to save Italy and set her in her place among the powerful nations, who held the duty of self-sacrifice in the most absolute sense, whose very limitations and mistakes were due to an absorbing passion for the state he dreamed might be reconstituted. It was Machiavelli’s intense preoccupation with this problem—what a state is and how to found one in existing circumstances—which caused the many riddles of his speculative writings. Dazzled, as it were, with the brilliancy of his own discovery, concentrated in attention on the one necessity for organizing a powerful coherent nation, he forgot that men are more than political beings. He neglected religion, or regarded it as part of the state machinery. He was by no means indifferent to private virtue, which indeed he judged the basis of all healthy national existence; but in the realm of politics he postponed morals to political expediency. He held that the people, as distinguished from the nobles and the clergy, were the pith and fibre of nations; yet this same people had to become wax in the hands of the politician—their commerce and their comforts, the arts which give a dignity to life and the pleasures which make life liveable, neglected—their very liberty subordinated to the one tyrannical conception. To this point the segregation of politics from every other factor which goes to constitute humanity had brought him; and this it is which makes us feel his world a wilderness, devoid of atmosphere and vegetation. Yet some such isolation of the subject matter of this science was demanded at the moment of its birth, just as political economy, when first started, had to make a rigid severance of wealth from other units. It is only by a gradual process that social science in its whole complexity can be evolved. We have hardly yet discovered that political economy has unavoidable points of contact with ethics.

From the foregoing criticism it will be perceived that all the questions whether Machiavelli meant to corrupt or to instruct the world, to fortify the hands of tyrants or to lead them to their ruin, are now obsolete. He was a man of science—one who by the vigorous study of his subject matter sought from that subject-matter itself to deduce laws. The difficulty which remains in judging him is a difficulty of statement, valuation, allowance. How much shall we allow for his position in Renaissance Italy, for the corruption in the midst of which he lived, for his own personal temperament? How shall we state his point of departure from the middle ages, his sympathy with prevalent classical enthusiasms, his divination of a new period? How shall we estimate the permanent worth of his method, the residuum of value in his maxims?

After finishing the Principe, Machiavelli thought of dedicating it to one of the Medicean princes, with the avowed hope that he might thereby regain their favour and find public employment. He wrote to Vettori on the subject, and Giuliano de’ Medici, duke of Nemours, seemed to him the proper person. The choice was reasonable. No sooner had Leo been made pope than he formed schemes for the aggrandizement of his family. Giuliano was offered and refused the duchy of Urbino. Later on, Leo designed for him a duchy in Emilia, to be cemented out of Parma, Piacenza, Reggio and Modena. Supported by the power of the papacy, with the goodwill of Florence to back him, Giuliano would have found himself in a position somewhat better than that of Cesare Borgia; and Borgia’s creation of the duchy of Romagna might have served as his model. Machiavelli therefore was justified in feeling that here was an opportunity for putting his cherished schemes in practice, and that a prince with such alliances might even advance to the grand end of the unification of Italy. Giuliano, however, died in 1506. Then Machiavelli turned his thoughts towards Lorenzo, duke of Urbino. The choice of this man as a possible Italian liberator reminds us of the choice of Don Micheletto as general of the Florentine militia. To Lorenzo the Principe was dedicated, but without result. The Medici, as yet at all events, could not employ Machiavelli, and had not in themselves the stuff to found Italian kingdoms.

Machiavelli, meanwhile, was reading his Discorsi to a select audience in the Rucellai gardens, fanning that republican enthusiasm which never lay long dormant among the Florentines. Towards the year 1519 both Leo X. and his cousin, the cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, were much perplexed about the management of the republic. It seemed necessary, if possible, in the gradual extinction of their family to give the city at least a semblance of self-government. They applied to several celebrated politicians, among others to Machiavelli, for advice in the emergency. The result was a treatise in which he deduced practical conclusions from the past history and present temper of the city, blending these with his favourite principles of government in general. He earnestly admonished Leo, for his own sake and for Florence, to found a permanent and free state system for the republic, reminding him in terms of noble eloquence how splendid is the glory of the man who shall confer such benefits upon a people. The year 1520 saw the composition of the Arte della guerra and the Vita di Castruccio.

The first of these is a methodical treatise, setting forth Machiavelli’s views on military matters, digesting his theories respecting the superiority of national troops, the inefficiency of fortresses, the necessity of relying upon infantry in war, and the comparative insignificance of artillery. It is strongly coloured with his enthusiasm for ancient Rome; and specially upon the topic of artillery it displays a want of insight into the actualities of modern warfare. We may regard it as a supplement or appendix to the Principe and the Discorsi, since Machiavelli held it for a fundamental axiom that states are powerless unless completely armed in permanence. The peroration contains a noble appeal to the Italian liberator of his dreams, and a parallel from Macedonian history, which, read by the light of this century, sounds like a prophecy of Piedmont.

The Vita di Castruccio was composed at Lucca, whither Machiavelli had been sent on a mission. This so-called biography of the medieval adventurer who raised himself by personal ability and military skill to the tyranny of several Tuscan cities must be regarded in the light of an historical romance. Dealing freely with the outline of Castruccio’s career, as he had previously dealt with Cesare Borgia, he sketched his own ideal of the successful prince. Cesare Borgia had entered into the Principe as a representative figure rather than an actual personage; so now conversely the theories of the Principe assumed the outward form and semblance of Castruccio. In each case history is blent with speculation in nearly the same proportions. But Castruccio, being farther from the writer’s own experience, bears weaker traits of personality.

In the same year, 1520, Machiavelli, at the instance of the cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, received commission from the officers of the Studio pubblico to write a history of Florence. They agreed to pay him an annual allowance of 100 florins while engaged upon the work. The next six years were partly employed in its composition, and he left a portion of it finished, with a dedication to Clement VII., when he died in 1527. In the Historie fiorentine Machiavelli quitted the field of political speculation for that of history. But, having already written the Discorsi and the Principe, he carried with him to this new task of historiography the habit of mind proper to political philosophy. In his hands the history of Florence became a text on which at fitting seasons to deliver lessons in the science he initiated. This gives the work its special character. It is not so much a chronicle of Florentine affairs, from the commencement of modern history to the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492, as a critique of that chronicle from the point of view adopted by Machiavelli in his former writings. Having condensed his doctrines in the Principe and the Discorsi, he applies their abstract principles to the example of the Florentine republic. But the History of Florence is not a mere political pamphlet. It is the first example in Italian literature of a national biography, the first attempt in any literature to trace the vicissitudes of a people’s life in their logical sequence, deducing each successive phase from passions or necessities inherent in preceding circumstances, reasoning upon them from general principles, and inferring corollaries for the conduct of the future. In point of form the Florentine History is modelled upon Livy. It contains speeches in the antique manner, which may be taken partly as embodying the author’s commentary upon situations of importance, partly as expressing what he thought dramatically appropriate to prominent personages. The style of the whole book is nervous, vivid, free from artifice and rhetoric, obeying the writer’s thought with absolute plasticity. Machiavelli had formed for himself a prose style, equalled by no one but by Guicciardini in his minor works, which was far removed from the emptiness of the latinizing humanists and the trivialities of the Italian purists. Words in his hands have the substance, the self-evidence of things. It is an athlete’s style, all bone and sinew, nude, without superfluous flesh or ornament.

It would seem that from the date of Machiavelli’s discourse to Leo on the government of Florence the Medici had taken him into consideration. Writing to Vettori in 1513, he had expressed his eager wish to “roll stones” in their service; and this desire was now gratified. In 1521 he was sent to Carpi to transact a petty matter with the chapter of the Franciscans, the chief known result of the embassy being a burlesque correspondence with Francesco Guicciardini. Four years later, in 1525, he received a rather more important mission to Venice. But Machiavelli’s public career was virtually closed; and the interest of his biography still centres in his literary work. We have seen that already, in 1504, he had been engaged upon a comedy in the manner of Aristophanes, which is now unfortunately lost. A translation of the Andria and three original comedies from his pen are extant, the precise dates of which are uncertain, though the greatest of them was first printed at Rome in 1524. This is the Mandragola, which may be justly called the ripest and most powerful play in the Italian language.

The plot is both improbable and unpleasing. But literary criticism is merged in admiration of the wit, the humour, the vivacity, the satire of a piece which brings before us the old life of Florence in a succession of brilliant scenes. If Machiavelli had any moral object when he composed the Mandragola, it was to paint in glaring colours the corruption of Italian society. It shows how a bold and plausible adventurer, aided by the profligacy of a parasite, the avarice and hypocrisy of a confessor, and a mother’s complaisant familiarity with vice, achieves the triumph of making a gulled husband bring his own unwilling but too yielding wife to shame. The whole comedy is a study of stupidity and baseness acted on by roguery. About the power with which this picture of domestic immorality is presented there can be no question. But the perusal of the piece obliges us to ask ourselves whether the author’s radical conception of human nature was not false. The same suspicion is forced upon us by the Principe. Did not Machiavelli leave good habit, as an essential ingredient of character, out of account? Men are not such absolute fools as Nicia, nor such compliant catspaws as Ligurio and Timoteo; women are not such weak instruments as Sostrata and Lucrezia. Somewhere, in actual life, the stress of craft and courage acting on the springs of human vice and weakness fails, unless the hero of the comedy or tragedy, Callimaco or Cesare, allows for the revolt of healthier instincts. Machiavelli does not seem to have calculated the force of this recoil. He speculates a world in which virtù, unscrupulous strength of character, shall deal successfully with frailty. This, we submit, was a deep-seated error in his theory of life, an error to which may be ascribed the numerous stumbling-blocks and rocks of offence in his more serious writings.

Some time after the Mandragola, he composed a second comedy, entitled Clizia, which is even homelier and closer to the life of Florence than its predecessor. It contains incomparable studies of the Florentine housewife and her husband, a grave business-like citizen, who falls into the senile folly of a base intrigue. There remains a short piece without title, the Commedia in prosa, which, if it be Machiavelli’s, as internal evidence of style sufficiently argues, might be accepted as a study for both the Clizia and the Mandragola. It seems written to expose the corruption of domestic life in Florence, and especially to satirize the friars in their familiar part of go-betweens, tame cats, confessors and adulterers.

Of Machiavelli’s minor poems, sonnets, capitoli and carnival songs there is not much to say. Powerful as a comic playwright, he was not a poet in the proper sense of the term. The little novel of Belfagor claims a passing word, if only because of its celebrity. It is a good-humoured satire upon marriage, the devil being forced to admit that hell itself is preferable to his wife’s company. That Machiavelli invented it to express the irritation of his own domestic life is a myth without foundation. The story has a medieval origin, and it was almost simultaneously treated in Italian by Machiavelli, Straparola and Giovanni Brevio.

In the spring of 1526 Machiavelli was employed by Clement VII. to inspect the fortifications of Florence. He presented a report upon the subject, and in the summer of the same year received orders to attend Francesco Guicciardini, the pope’s commissary of war in Lombardy. Guicciardini sent him in August to Cremona, to transact business with the Venetian provveditori. Later on in the autumn we find him once more with Guicciardini at Bologna. Thus the two great Italian historians of the 16th century, who had been friends for several years, were brought into relations of close intimacy.