Why Dante

I am living on my farm . . . and what my life is now I will tell you. In the morning I get up with the sun and go out into a grove that I am having out; there I remain a couple of hours to look over the work of the past day, and kill some time with the woodsmen, who are always engaged in some dispute, either among themselves or their neighbors . . . .

When I leave the grove, I go to a spring . . . . I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch or one of the minor poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and their like. I read about their tender passions and their loves, remember my own, and for a while take pleasure in thinking about them. Then I go down the road to the inn, talk with those who pass by, ask the news of their villages, learn many things, and note the varied tastes and different fancies of men. Then it gets to be dinner time, and with my family I eat what food my poor farm and little acreage permit.

After dinner, I return to the inn; there I usually find the host, a butcher, a miller and others, and with these fellows I sink into vulgarity for the rest of the day, playing at cards; and from our games come a thousand quarrels and endless offensive and insulting words . . . . So, caught up in these trifles, I keep my brain from getting mouldy, and I express the perversity of Fate, as I am willing to have her drive me along this path, to see if she will be ashamed of it.

In the evening, I return home, and go into my study. At the door I take off the clothes I have worn all day, mud-spotted and dirty, and put on regal and courtly garments. Thus appropriately clad, I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men, where, being lovingly received, I feed on that food which alone is mine and for which I was born. I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask the reasons for their actions, and they courteously answer me. For . . . hours I feel no boredom [sic] and I forget every worry; I do not fear poverty, and death does not terrify me. I give myself completely over to them.

So wrote Niccolò Machiavelli from his home near Florence to a friend in Rome. It was the 10th of December 1513, and I am sure I did not mislead many into taking this for a more recent report from a farm and a way of life in the country. Machiavelli's letter is much too famous for even that to happen. He was, you remember, out of a job, being quite out of favor with those Medici princes who had come back into power in the city-state of Florence which ser Niccolò had served so long while it was a Republic. He had been under-Secretary of State, as we should say, in that Government. But here he was, out of a job, obliged to stay put at home for a change, and very unhappy about it all. And we know the abundant fruits of that time of enforced leisure: the Prince and the Discourses on Livy.

But, our present concern being with Dante, why begin so far afield? We have a question about Dante before us (as shortly as I could make it), and I may not presume too much on your patience in finding, or trying to find, an answer to it. Machiavelli was at work on his masterpiece almost exactly two centuries from the time Dante was working at his. And two centuries are a long time. We have only to lay the rule upon our own American past to get the sense of that.

To be sure, you will have noted that among the poets Machiavelli took to his grove in the morning, there was Dante. But then for him in these days on the farm, morning was, as you also noted, a time for nothing too serious. He was as likely to dip...