https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/machiavelli-calumny-and-free-speech-on-campus/
“Opposing same-sex marriage, challenging the assertion of rape culture on campus, and failing to put what is deemed an acceptable number of female authors on a literature course is enough to see you accused, convicted and condemned. This is not education or anything like it.”
I join those who are criticising schools and universities for failing to educate young members of Western societies in their own traditions of moral and political thought. But this criticism often takes the form of vague moralising which is short on examples that show how we can benefit from studying those traditions. And because it is deficient in this way, this criticism often has a small claim upon the attention of people in the business of education, and the society at large. I’d like to try to improve the situation by providing an example of how reading and thinking about works from the past can be of value in dealing with important moral and political issues, such as freedom of expression, education, and civil liberty in general. I also aim to identify a serious problem with our universities and propose a solution for it.
Let’s remember one of the great works of the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio). Machiavelli wrote this work after he had completed The Prince, probably between 1514 and 1519, but it was not published until 1531, four years after his death. This work is now commonly referred to as the Discourses, and it is a commentary on the first ten books of the monumental history of ancient Rome—From the Founding of the City (Ab Urbe Condite)—that was written by the ancient Roman historian we now refer to as Livy. Despite Machiavelli’s rather sinister reputation, the Discourses is now widely seen as one of the most powerful and influential analyses of civil liberty and republics in the Western tradition of political thought.
In the first book of the Discourses, Machiavelli comments on an incident involving two of the great military and political figures of the early Roman republic, Furius Camillus and Manlius Capitolinus. Both men had displayed outstanding virtue in serving Rome: after the Gauls had sacked the city in 390 BC, Manlius Capitolinus remained with a garrison on the Capitol (the summit of the Capitoline hill on which the temple of Jupiter stood). Alerted by the sacred geese to an attack by the Gauls, he and his men repelled them and saved the Capitol (hence his cognomen, Capitolinus); Furius Camillus led the Roman military to several victories over its enemies, including the Gauls, and he oversaw the reconstruction of the city once the Gauls had been defeated under his command.
Though both men were regarded at the time as heroes of the republic, the Romans granted a pre-eminence to Camillus, which did not sit well with Capitolinus, who felt he was every bit as good. Machiavelli observes that “so fraught was he with envy that he could not remain tranquil while Camillus had such glory, but, realising that he could not sow discord among the patricians, he turned to the plebs and disseminated among them diverse sinister rumours” (I cite the Walker/Richardson translation). Among other things, Capitolinus accused Camillus and other Roman patricians of embezzling and withholding public funds, an accusation that inflamed the plebeians against the patricians and, for a while, made them think Capitolinus was on their side. The Senate appointed an official (a “dictator”) in order to deal with this standoff between Camillus and the patricians in the Senate, and Capitolinus and the plebeians. This official commanded Capitolinus to appear in public, and asked him to provide evidence for his accusations and to identify those who held the funds he claimed had been embezzled and withheld. Capitolinus provided no details, so the dictator sent him to prison. Eventually united in the view that he was a danger to the republic, the patricians and the populace ordered that he be thrown to his death (as depicted above) “from the Capitol which he had once saved with such renown”. And he was.
Machiavelli approves of the Romans’ treatment of Capitolinus. Indeed, he claims the incident “shows how perfect the city then was and how good the material of which it was composed”. On Machiavelli’s view, the Romans rightly saw Capitolinus as a “calumniator”. A calumniator is a person who makes serious accusations against other citizens without providing sufficient evidence or witnesses to support those accusations. Calumniators make these accusations unofficially, in private, and promote their circulation “in the squares and the arcades”. And, on Machiavelli’s account, the Romans also rightly saw that calumny is a potent means of achieving political power and objectives:
calumnies … are among the various things of which citizens have availed themselves in order to acquire greatness, and are very effective when employed against powerful citizens who stand in the way of one’s plans, because by playing up to the populace and confirming the poor view it takes of such men one can make it one’s friend.
