their citizens poor.’’ Machiavelli makes clear that he approves of legal meas-
ures designed to ensure an equal and moderate distribution of wealth on
prudential grounds: great wealth, he argues, attracts dependents and under-
mines the supremacy of the public good (Nelson 2004 , 73 – 86 ). Machiavelli’s
only complaint about the Gracchan agrarian laws is that they were ‘‘back-
ward-looking.’’ They attempted to address a civic pathology that was of such
scale and long-standing that they were doomed to failure. Machiavelli is not
at all concerned with the standard Roman objection that agrarian laws are
‘‘unjust.’’ His only worry is that, in this case, they undermined the glory of the
republic. Such was the transformed version of the Roman republican case
that Machiavelli bequeathed to the seventeenth century.
2 Northern Europe and the Turn
Toward Greece
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Up until now, we have deWned republicanism as an essentially Roman
ideology, and that is, indeed, the dominant deWnition among contemporary
scholars and political theorists. 12 But this view is incomplete. 13 At the very
same time that Machiavelli was writing hisDiscourses, an English humanist
was busy composing an imaginative account of the ideal republic which
adopted an overtly polemical attitude toward the Roman sources we have
been discussing. The humanist in question was Sir Thomas More, and the
treatise he wrote wasUtopia. More’s work was written in the shadow of the
12 A notable exception is J. G. A. Pocock, who views the republican tradition as an outgrowth of
Aristotle’s political teleology. See Pocock ( 1975 ).
13 To begin with, in the 1260 s, William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation of Aristotle’sPoliticswas
introduced into theregnum italicum. It provided a powerful new perspective on the situation of the
self-governing Italian city-states, and was the animating force behind the Neapolitan Thomas Aqui-
nas’s account of political life in theSumma theologiaeand in the unWnishedDe regimine principum.
Several of Aquinas’s scholastic disciples, such as Ptolemy of Lucca and Marsilius of Padua, used
Aristotelian arguments about the relationship between widespread political participation and civic
peace to augment the standard Romanencomiaof ‘‘free states’’ in the following century. This literature
did not, however, challenge any of the cardinal assumptions of the Roman tradition. The challenge
came, rather, from another quarter. See, for example, Rubinstein ( 1982 , 153 – 200 ); and Skinner ( 1978 ,
vol. 1 , 49 – 65 ).
republican visions 203