Between friends: discourses of power and desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori letters of 1513-1515 (review)

162 Reviews admitting that he is less than successful. Similarly, Moorhead is concerned to give an account of what happened in Theoderic's Italy, has left no source unturned, but admits that problems remain. One major problem at least that they both have in common, Moorhead more so than Gregory, is that they are reliant on Roman sources for non-Roman history. Making the most of his sources leads Moorhead to valuable discussion of senatorial and papal matters, Byzantine-Italian relations, and late antique culture involving Ennodius, Cassiodorus, Boethius, and then chcles. Boethius is impossible to consider without hindsight and runs a close second to Theoderic as a focus in the later parts of the book. A major theme is tracing aristocratic factions in ways that link all of the above. In general the evidence for this is teased out carefully and sensibly, as is characteristic of the whole book. However, the statement that Anicius Probus Faustus niger 'is reported to have been the only senator to have supported Pope Symmachus during the Laurentian schism' (p. 163) is jarring after reading earlier (p. 131) about uncertainty as to where other senators stood. The real problem of evidence and sources, however, relates to the Goths and other barbarian followers of the great king Theoderic. Their king ruled in Italy, then warriors formed the army, and then leading men were surely prominent among the king's counsellors. There is a world at Theoderic's court which is as closed to us as the mosaic of his palace in the formerly Arian church of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, where figures of presumably Arian Goths standing in the arcades have been replaced by curtains, leaving only a few of then hands on the columns. Perhaps i t is a world about which w e can only ask questions; for example, why did Theoderic rather than Clovis enter the Germanic tradition? Nevertheless, its existence must stiU be taken into account before concluding with Moorhead that Theoderic's reign in Italy did not look forward into the Middle Ages. Lynette Olson Department of History University of Sydney Najemy, John M., Between friends: discourses of power and desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori letters of 1513-1515, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. xiii, 358; R.R.P. US$39.50/£29.50 The correspondence of Niccolb Machiavelli and Francesco Vettori is best known for two of the letters that Machiavelli wrote to his friend and former Reviews 163 coUeague in Rome. Thefirstis that of 9 April 1513, in which he wrote that fortune had determined that since he was unable to talk about the merchant world, he must discuss politics or else take a vow of silence. The second is that of 10 December, in which he informed Vettori of the birth of The Prince and created the legend of his life in exUe and the gestation of his treatise. Students of Machiavelli have tended to focus for the most part on these two letters and on then author. Thus Vettori has been relegated to the role of a shadowy recipient of the letters. John Najemy insists both that the correspondence should be treated as a whole and that Vettori's role in the development of Machiavelli's ideas during 1513 and beyond was important. Thus he reads the letters as collaborative text. While links between the correspondence and The Prince have long been recognized, what Najemy does is to show just how complex and extensive the connections are. He suggests that The Prince was in many of its pages a continuation of the dialogue with Vettori and a whole complex of answers to the reservations and doubts that Vettori had expressed throughout 1513 about both Machiavelli's analysis of particular situations and also his theoretical framework. If posterity recognizes Machiavelli, at the time of the correspondence it was Vettori who was the more important and influential figure. Unlike Machiavelli, Vettori was a member of the Florentine ruling class and of its inner circles of power and influence. Despite a somewhat ambivalent role in tbe days that saw the overthrow of the republican regime in Florence and the return of the Medici, he maintained his...