THE POLITICS OF LUCK

By

Daniel Schillinger

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Political Science

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Daniel Schillinger (2018)

ii

THE POLITICS OF LUCK

Daniel Schillinger

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Political Science

University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This dissertation considers the place of luck in political life through examination of the

political thought of Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli. I turn to these thinkers

because, in my view, they approach the idea of luck from a strongly skeptical,

deflationary, and psychological vantage point. By contrast, contemporary political

theorists and philosophers often reify the idea of luck as something “out there” in the

world—for example, in the literatures on “luck egalitarianism” and “moral luck.” These

contemporaries have turned to the idea of luck in order to gain leverage on issues of

governance, distributive justice, ethical responsibility, and political agency. However,

precisely because Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli offer more conceptually

nuanced and psychologically acute reflections on both the idea of luck itself and its role

in political life, they offer better resources for clarifying these perennial issues. In

particular, for these thinkers, the idea of luck is a piece of “folk wisdom” that arises only

because of the limitations of human agency: when agents prove incapable of foreseeing

and controlling significant events, then luck is invoked in order to describe what has

happened. Yet even if the idea of luck inheres in intellectual beliefs and psychological

orientations rather than in the warp and weft of reality itself, these attitudes still play

critical roles in political life. Ultimately, I construct a dialogue between Aristotle,

Thucydides, and Machiavelli regarding the virtues of both political leaders and ordinary

iii

citizens that constitute efficacious political agency in the face of contingency. Practical

wisdom (and, to a lesser extent, courage) comes to light as the key virtue at issue because

leaders and citizens call upon this virtue in particular when they respond to ostensible

good or bad luck.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A million thanks to my supervisor, Ryan Balot. Working with Ryan was an honor and a

pleasure. Anyone who knows Ryan’s work will see that I have tried to follow his

example. Clifford Orwin’s teaching and scholarship—especially his unforgettable

Thucydides seminar—stamped my time in Toronto from the beginning. Ronnie Beiner

was an extremely generous reader and interlocutor. Without his advice, the dissertation

would look very different. While Arlene Saxonhouse read the project in its final form, her

comments will shape its next iteration.

The Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto was (and

remains) full of interesting minds and good people. Thanks in particular to Ella Street,

David Polansky, Nate Gilmore, and Seth Jaffe for their conversation and friendship.

I first studied political philosophy under Larry Cooper at Carleton College, where

I also met (and briefly studied with) Joel Schlosser. At Ashland University, I'm trying to

carry forth their genuinely Socratic approach to teaching.

My deepest debt is to my parents, Lori and Peter, and to my sister, Hannah.

Finally, and since acknowledgments tend to be trite, I'll mention that my wife, Emily,

suggested that I dedicate this project on the topic of luck to “my blackjack dealer.”

Instead, I'll dedicate it to Emily—and to Wes, who was born in March 2017.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Luck, Politics, and Political Theory 1

Approaches to the Idea of Luck 10

Luck, Responsibility, and Justice 24

Political Agency in the Face of Contingency 33

Chapter 2

The Idea of Luck in Aristotle’s Thought 41

The Idea of Luck in Physics 2.4-6 46

Luck and Responsibility for Actions in NE 3.1 57

Luck, Statesmanship, and Legislation in the Politics 75

Chapter 3

Luck and Character in Machiavelli’s Political Thought 89

Luck and Character in The Prince 93

The Problem of Fortune Solved? Machiavelli’s Discourses 109

The Constancy of Machiavelli’s Marcus Furius Camillus 119

The Inconstancy of Machiavelli 125

Chapter 4

Deliberation and Daring: Thucydides on Luck and Democracy 130

The Idea of Luck in the History 134

Pericles on Deliberation, Daring, and Luck 139

Periclean Athens Exposed 152

The Spartan Objection 162

Luck, Agency, and Responsibility in Thucydides’ History 170

Conclusion

The Politics of Luck 180

Works Cited 185

1

CHAPTER 1: LUCK, POLITICS, AND POLITICAL THEORY

Introduction

First published in a 1948 issue of The New Yorker, Shirley Jackson’s story, “The

Lottery,” is both perfunctory and provocative.1 In the space of a few pages, a small

village, apparently American, selects by lot and stones to death one of its own citizens.

Jackson leaves ringing in the ears of the reader the protests of the unlucky victim: “‘It

isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”2 What

this story accomplishes, thematically, is contested. Judith Shklar notes that the piece was

written during the McCarthy era and could be read as parable of political persecution.3

What is beyond contestation, however, is the story’s association of luck and injustice.

The conceptual association of luck and injustice is ubiquitous in contemporary political

thought and practice. Liberals, conservatives, and mainstream political theorists agree on

this much: no one should be held responsible for what happens to him by luck;

consequently, distributive and retributive outcomes should be defined over and against

those determined by dumb luck.4

1 Jackson, “The Lottery,” 291-302.

2 Ibid., 302.

3 Shklar, “Injustice, Injury, and Inequality,” 30.

4 Influential political and economic thinkers on both the left and the right have attempted

to justify their approaches to issues of both moral responsibility and distributive justice in

light of a hard distinction between the ideas of choice and luck. Cf. Dworkin, Sovereign

Virtue, 444; Friedman, “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of Income,” 289-

2

Equally prominent right now is the argument that the state can and should

neutralize the effects of luck on the lives of individuals. For Richard Arneson and other

“luck egalitarians,” technologies of governance and administration can identify and

compensate individuals whose bad luck in the so-called social and natural lotteries

inhibits their life prospects.5 Luck egalitarians imagine a well-ordered democratic society

in which each individual fully controls his or her own destiny, precisely because through

compensating individuals for bad luck, everyone will (hypothetically) start in the same

90. At the same time, while it is commonplace to distinguish between choice and luck,

and while many people would agree that as a matter of justice the state should seek to

provide opportunities for choice and to protect the outcomes of choice, both political

theorists and ordinary citizens disagree about the extent to which luck on the one hand

and choice on the other are efficacious or determinative in the lives of ordinary people. In

a New York Times Op-Ed published in 2005, Matt Miller reports that he polled liberal and

conservative Americans on the question: “which matters most in determining where

people end up in life?” The poll provided just two possible responses to this question—

either luck or effort. Although Miller does not record the exact results, he writes that

“liberals or Democrats overwhelmingly said luck; most conservatives or Republicans said

individual effort.” Disagreements about these issues therefore track party affiliations.

Today there exist multiple American “politics of luck.” See Miller, “Taking Luck

Seriously”; and Taleb, Black Swan, 52.

5 Arneson, “Luck Egalitarianism—A Primer,” 43-44.

3

place.6 Control, then, is a keynote of contemporary political discourse on luck: the state

controls luck so that citizens may control their own lives. In fact, as Ian Hacking has

shown in his seminal philosophical genealogy, The Taming of Chance, the contemporary

fascination with luck ultimately arises out of the aspiration to control it.7

In my view, both the conceptual association of luck with injustice and the

practical aspiration to tame chance are quixotic at best and misguided and self-defeating

at worst. Elizabeth Anderson has argued, persuasively, that a luck-egalitarian utopia

would actually fail to secure the relations of equality, liberty, and respect that have

always defined admirable democracies.8 By compensating some citizens for their putative

ugliness or stupidity on the grounds that these qualities are pieces of bad luck, the

democratic society imagined by the luck egalitarians could lead these citizens to believe

6 For early articulations of this approach to theorizing distributive justice, see Dworkin,

“What Is Equality? Part 1,” 185-246; Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2,” 283-345;

Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” 906-944; and Arneson, “Equality and

Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” 77-93.

7 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10: “I write of the taming of chance, that is, of the way in

which apparently chance or irregular events have been brought under the control of

natural or social law. The world became not more chancy, but far less so.” See also

Hacking, Emergence of Probability; Strauss, City and Man, 15.

8 Anderson offers the classic statement on the ascendancy of luck as nemesis in post-

Rawlsian, egalitarian political theory. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” 287-

337.

4

that they are less worthy and less capable than their peers, at once undermining their self-

respect and sapping their energy for citizenship.9 Such a democracy would thereby

realize Tocqueville’s worst fears regarding “administrative centralization” and “soft

despotism.”10 Equally important, the excessive rationalization and bureaucratization of

political life could increase the effects of contingency or capriciousness on the lives of

individuals. When one’s opportunities for employment, if not happiness, are determined

by instruments so impersonal and blunt as bureaucratic rules and market forces, then

unforeseeable and ironical discontinuities between actions and outcomes are

inescapable.11

9 On what Anderson calls “the problem of paternalism,” see especially “What Is the

Point,” 305: “to require citizens to display evidence of personal inferiority to get aid from

the state is to reduce them to groveling for support.” Frequently, and unwittingly, the luck

egalitarians endorse paternalistic policies (and hence inequality) precisely because they

aim to neutralize the effects of luck on the lives of citizens. On the need for maintaining

relations of equal respect in the welfare state, consider the reflections of Ignatieff, The

Needs of Strangers. But fundamentally, the problem is that “the idea of neutralizing bad

or good luck provides no independent reason to favor equality as the principle of

distribution.” See Hurley, “Luck and Equality,” 59.

10 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 88-89, 646-673.

11 For example, Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” esp. 4-5; and the commentary of Beiner,

Political Philosophy, xliii-lv. See also, Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.

5

On a more philosophical plane, moreover, these contemporary approaches to luck

and politics depend upon an inadequate account of luck itself. When luck egalitarians

refer to “brute luck” (in contradistinction to “option luck”), they have in mind

unforeseeable, uncontrollable events that simply happen to agents no matter what they

know or do.12 For the luck egalitarians, and (as we will see) for many scholars who write

on the topic of luck across the disciplines, luck is somehow “out there” in the world. In

Ronald Dworkin’s memorable example, bad luck strikes like “a falling meteorite,” that is,

in the manner of an utterly unpredictable and irresistible external force.13

I elaborate an alternative approach to the topic of luck by turning to the history of

political thought—in particular, to the writings of Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli.

For these thinkers, the idea of luck is not “out there” in the world. Instead, luck is an

epistemic phenomenon, and the idea of luck refers to an explanation or a description of

action rather than to a cause of motion or change in its own right. Thus the reflections on

12 On the distinction between “brute luck” and “option luck,” see especially Vallentine,

“Brute Luck, Option Luck,” 529-557. But Hurley notes that this distinction is misleading

insofar as option luck does not truly count as a type of luck for many luck egalitarians.

Option luck instead refers to a gamble or a calculated risk that backfired and for which

the agent remains fully responsible. The luck egalitarian position is that distributive

justice requires correcting all distributive outcomes that are caused by luck in

contradistinction to human action, full stop. See Hurley, “Luck and Equality,” 51 n.1.

13 Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2,” 293.

6

luck found in the writings of Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli have a strongly

skeptical, deflationary, and psychological bent.

This shared approach to the topic of luck has multiple implications for thinking

about politics. For example, as I will argue in my interpretation of Aristotle’s thought,

because luck is not “out there” in the world, it is incumbent upon political leaders and

citizens to grasp the true political causalities that lie beneath the appearance of either

good or bad luck. Moreover, even if the idea of luck inheres in intellectual beliefs and

psychological orientations rather than in the warp and weft of reality itself, these attitudes

still play critical roles in political life, as the chapters on both Machiavelli and

Thucydides will make clear. Perceptions of good or bad luck frequently elicit emotions,

such as hope and fear, which have the power by themselves to change the minds of

citizens deliberating in the assembly or fighting on the battlefield. Indeed, political

leaders often grasp this fact, and they use the rhetoric of luck to manage the emotions of

ordinary people, for better or worse. Recognizing that luck is a piece of “folk wisdom”

can help us to appreciate these Machiavellian dynamics in our own political life.

Yet, even as my chosen authors suggest that the idea of luck is a piece of folk

wisdom, they also maintain, each in his own way, that this piece of folk wisdom contains

significant wisdom indeed. For example, we will see that Aristotle uses the common-

sense idea of luck to show that the responsibilities of political leaders extend beyond their

capacities fully to foresee and to control the circumstances or the effects of their deeds.

We will also see that, for Machiavelli, the character of the virtuous prince is shaped,

paradoxically, by the experience of extreme bad luck. Finally, by attending to

7

Thucydides’ History, we will see that Periclean-Athenian civic discourses on the idea of

bad luck may have helped the Athenians “to go on together” in the face of disaster.14

Thus I turn to the history of political thought not simply because I seek to

elaborate a deflationary account of luck that calls into question the philosophical

assumptions that lie at the core of contemporary luck egalitarianism. In fact, much of this

critical work has already been accomplished: Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and

other theorists of “moral luck” have offered honest, even brutally pessimistic accounts of

the place of luck in our ethical lives.15 While my debt to Williams’ thought on the issues

of luck and ethical responsibility will soon become clear, I go beyond Williams, because

14 I borrow this language from Ober, Athenian Legacies, 3.

15 The key text is Williams’s original article, “Moral Luck,” esp. 125-26: “One’s history

as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and

held up and partly formed by things that are not, in such a way that reflection can only go

in one of two directions: either in the direction of saying that responsible agency is a

fairly superficial concept, which has limited use in harmonizing what happens, or else

that it is not a superficial concept, but that it ultimately cannot be purified—if one

attaches importance to the sense of what one is in terms of what one has done and what in

the world one is responsible for, one must accept much that makes its claim on that sense

solely in virtue of its being actual.” See also Williams, Shame and Necessity, 163-64;

Williams, Moral Luck, 10; Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 146; and Nussbaum, Fragility of

Goodness, especially the summary of her interpretation of Aristotle on 380-81.

8

his work remains both apolitical and entangled in the Kantian categories that he so

acutely criticized.16

In particular, by constructing a dialogue among Aristotle, Machiavelli, and

Thucydides, I aim to theorize virtues that could empower both political leaders and

ordinary citizens to think and to act well amid events that would appear to many people

to be extremely lucky or unlucky. Practical wisdom (and, to a lesser extent, courage)

comes to light as the key virtue at issue, because leaders and citizens call upon this virtue

in particular when they respond to ostensible good or bad luck. As Aristotle puts the

point, “someone who is truly good and sensible bears up under all kinds of luck (pasas

tas tuchas) in a becoming way and always does what is noblest given the circumstances,

just as a good general makes use, with the greatest military skill, of the army he has” (NE

1.10.1100b37-1101a4).17 Like the general, the pilot, or any other expert craftsman, the

16 I explain this point at greater length below. See also Pippin, “Williams on Nietzsche

and the Greeks,” 166-74.

17 Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Nicomachean Ethics refer to Bartlett and

Collins, trans., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. My own translations and transliterations

refer to the Greek edition of Bywater, Ethica Nicomachea. Translations of Aristotle’s

Politics refer to Lord, trans., Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd ed., unless otherwise noted. My own

translations and transliterations refer to Newman, ed., The Politics of Aristotle. Finally,

translations of the Physics usually refer to Apostle, trans., Aristotle’s Physics, or to the

Greek of the Oxford text, edited and revised by Ross. All references to Aristotle are

inlaid in the text. Other works and commentaries are cited and discussed in Chapter 2.

9

person of practical wisdom (phronimos) locates an “opportune” (kairos) course of action

even and especially in unlucky circumstances (NE 2.2.1104a9-10).

At the same time, each thinker offers his own distinctive conceptualization of

practical wisdom and its responsiveness to the appearance of good or bad luck.

Ultimately, I use Thucydides’ critical account of deliberative rationality (gnōmē) in

democratic Athens to explore, if not to answer, the Machiavellian question: how can

citizens eschew intoxication or insolence in good luck and abjectness in bad luck (see D

3.31)?18 Alternatively put, Pericles says in the last line of his final speech: “The most

powerful cities and individuals are the ones who, with respect to misfortune, least lose

their minds and most stand their ground” (2.64.6).19 The question is whether and how a

18 I cite The Prince and the Discourses on Livy according to the standard fashion (by

work, book, chapter, and paragraph), and I inlay references in the text. I follow the

Mansfield translation of The Prince and the Mansfield-Tarcov translation of the

Discourses. Other editions of these texts in addition to Machiavelli’s minor works are

cited and discussed in Chapter 3.

19 My translation. References to Thucydides are inlaid in the text and refer to the text by

book, chapter, and line numbers as appropriate. My own translations and transliterations

refer to the Oxford Classical Text, edited by Jones and revised by Powell. Wherever

possible, I use the translation of Woodruff, Thucydides on Justice, Power, and Human

Nature. Because Woodruff has only translated selections of the History, I frequently rely

instead on the recent translation of Mynott, trans., Thucydides: The War of the

10

democracy could fulfill (or suitably modify) this Periclean promise. The development of

my argument toward an answer to this question is thematic rather than chronological. I

move from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Thucydides, and hence from the prudential

responses of political leaders to ostensible good or bad luck in Aristotle’s thought, to the

responses to luck of both leaders and the people in Machiavelli, to the responses to luck

of the full-fledged Athenian democracy in the age of Pericles in Thucydides.

Approaches to the Idea of Luck

During the twentieth century, “chance, which was once the superstition of the vulgar,

became the centrepiece of natural and social science, or so genteel or rational people are

led to believe.”20 Thus Ian Hacking frames the intellectual preoccupation with luck in our

time. While we have seen that some political theorists,21 economists,22 statisticians,23 and

“pop” essayists,24 write about the best ways to neutralize luck or to make one’s own luck,

Peloponnesians and the Athenians, and I modify this translation as necessary. Additional

translations and commentaries are cited and discussed in Chapter 4.

20 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10.

21 For example, Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 1,” 185-246; Dworkin, “What Is

Equality? Part 2,” 283-345.

22 Friedman, “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of Income,” 289-90.

23 See, for example, the various responses to Taleb’s Black Swan published in the

American Statistician, especially Lund, “Revenge of the White Swan,” 189-92.

24 Wiseman, Luck Factor.

11

others who write in these same disciplines or genres25 (not to mention political

scientists,26 philosophers,27 sociologists,28 classicists,29 cultural anthropologists,30 and

novelists31), have rehabilitated what Hacking calls “the superstition of the vulgar”—that

is, the idea of luck as something mysterious, uncontrollable, and irregular. Hacking

25 For example, among political theorists, consider the following line from Arendt, “What

Is Authority?,” 137: “Virtù is the response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather

to the constellation of fortuna in which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to

him, to his virtù. There is no virtù without fortuna and no fortuna without virtù.” Among

statisticians and essayists, see Taleb, Black Swan. The non-academic author who has

most influenced my own approach to the idea of luck is Didion. See Year of Magical

Thinking, 172-74.

26 For example, Shapiro and Bedi, eds., Political Contingency.

27 Williams’s work on moral luck has spawned a whole philosophical literature on the

topic. See, for example, Statman, ed., Moral Luck; and Athanassoulis, Fortune’s Web.

28 For example, Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility,” 1-10.

29 For example, Eidinow, Luck, Fate, and Fortune; Wohl, ed., Probabilities,

Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals.

30 For example, Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture.

31 McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 153; Smith, White Teeth, 347: “Of course, he understood

the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You

work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your

name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door.”

12

himself adopts this approach: “But how can chance ever be tamed? Parallel to the taming

of chance . . . there arose a self-conscious conception of pure irregularity, of something

wilder than the kinds of chance that had been excluded by the Age of Reason.”32 But

before it is possible to decide whether luck can be tamed, it is necessary to say exactly

what it is.

As a starting point, consider that the scholarly literature on the idea of luck is

replete with figures, metaphors, and thought experiments.33 Perhaps it is no accident that

the idea of luck has its own iconography—from the bona dea to the wheel of fortune to

32 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10.

33 Rescher’s Brilliant Randomness is a compendium of such illustrations; see especially

the chapter titled “The Different Faces of Luck,” 70-86. The original articles on moral

luck written by Williams and Nagel center on various thought experiments and literary or

historical episodes: the child who wanders into the oncoming taxi; the possible

counterfactual outcomes of Anna Karenina’s affair with Vronsky; the possible

counterfactual outcomes of Gauguin’s decision to abandon his family, to move to the

Haiti, and to attempt to become a famous painter; the bird that flies into the path of the

bullet; the decision of Chamberlain to sign the Munich agreement; the counterfactual

possibility that a Nazi might have been born in South America rather than in Germany.

See Williams, “Moral Luck,” 117-24; Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 137-46. There is nothing

wrong with thought experiments in and of themselves, but the bewildering number and

variety of them adduced by Williams and Nagel gives one the impression that the central

concept—luck itself—remains obscure for the authors.

13

the black cat.34 The haziness of the idea may invite these reifications. Even those

philosophers who have made a special study of luck offer conflicting definitions of the

term. For Williams, as for Alasdair MacIntyre, luck refers to what is unpredictable;35 for

Hacking, to what is highly improbable, or even random;36 for Nussbaum and Thomas

Nagel, to what is uncontrollable;37 for Dworkin, to what is both uncontrollable and

34 See Rescher, Brilliant Randomness, 8-12. On the classical iconography of luck (tuchē)

and fate (moira), see Eidinow, Luck, Fate, and Fortune, passim. On the Renaissance

iconography of fortune or luck (fortuna), see Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 140-44;

Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 120.

35 Williams, “Moral Luck, 128. Williams features examples of moral luck in which

agents regret what they do even though they deliberated well, or in which they

deliberated poorly but still accept the results of their actions. For Williams, luck seems to

refer to outcomes of human action that could not have been foreseen. Similarly,

MacIntyre finds “four systematic sources of unpredictability in human affairs” (90):

“radical conceptual innovation” (90); “the unpredictability of my future by me” (96); “the

indefinite reflexivity of game theoretic situations” (97); “trivial contingencies can

powerfully influence the outcome of great events” (100).

36 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10.

37 Nussbam, Fragility of Goodness, 3-4. On the next page, I analyze Nussbaum’s

conceptualization of luck. Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 138: “Prior to reflection, it is intuitively

plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is

due to factors beyond their control.” As Nagel’s initial formulation of the idea of moral

14

unintentional;38 for Richard Rorty, to what is contingent.39 There is little agreement,

moreover, about the appropriate conceptual terminology: while some scholars refer

exclusively to “luck,” others prefer “chance,” “fortune,” or “contingency.” Surveying

these various areas of confusion, a skeptic might wonder whether luck refers to a unitary

concept, or whether these different overtones should be distinguished via a more

differential terminology.

The question of luck’s definition has not been given its due. For all their

differences, Nussbaum, MacIntyre, Dworkin, and others write about luck as if the term

referred to a clearly defined and observable phenomenon out in the world. Reading their

studies of luck, one gets the impression that human experience can be divided into two

fields: on the one hand, there is the field of human agency, in which human beings

exercise significant control over their actions through deliberation; on the other hand,

there is the field of luck, in which events befall human beings no matter what they know

or do.40 For example, Nussbaum writes: “what happens to a person by luck will be just

luck, this line clearly identifies luck as what is uncontrollable. See also Barry, “Is It

Better to Be Powerful or Lucky? Part 1,” 184.

38 Cf. Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2,” 293; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 444.

39 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 31, 51, 60.

40 As we will see, the “two-fields” view of luck is also an important interpretative lens

through which scholars (mis)interpret Aristotle and Thucydides. For example, Cornford

writes of Thucydides’ History: “two factors—gnōmē, human foresight, purpose, motive,

and Tuchē, unforeseen non-human agencies—divide the field between them. . . . One

15

what does not happen to a person through his or her own agency, what just happens to

him, as opposed to what he does or makes.”41 The Fragility of Goodness goes on to

elaborate the various ways in which luck impedes doing or making, for human beings

everywhere and always. Nussbaum does not explain, however, why she assumes that luck

refers to some deep feature of reality itself. Is it not possible that the appearance of luck

reflects our own limitations as agents?

speaker after another in the History dwells on the contrast between a man’s own gnōmē

over which he has complete control, and Fortune over which he has no control at all.”

Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 105.

41 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 3. In fact, though, Nussbaum’s view of luck is even

more expansive than this line implies; indeed, it is expansive to the point of incoherence.

Nussbaum goes on to say in the very next line that “to eliminate luck from human life

will be to put that life, or the most important things within it, under the control of the

agent (or of those elements in him with which he identifies himself), removing the

element of reliance upon the external and undependable.” In the first line (quoted in the

body of the chapter), Nussbaum seems to say that luck refers to one kind of external

happening as opposed to human doing and making. This second line, though, uses the

idea of luck to refer to the totality of phenomena outside human agency. But certainly

many things come to be neither through human action nor through luck. I engage in a

critical dialogue with Nussbaum throughout the dissertation. Although there are multiple

problems with her argument, including its overly sentimental depiction of human

passivity, the most fundamental problem is that luck for her is everything and nothing.

16

Indeed, in my view, the idea of luck arises only because of the limitations of

human agency: when actors prove incapable of foreseeing and controlling significant

events, then luck is invoked in order to describe what has happened. Each of my chosen

thinkers approaches luck as an epistemic phenomenon rather than as a constitutive

principle of the world. That Machiavelli takes a demystifying stance toward luck is well-

known.42 In Chapter 25 of The Prince, for example, Machiavelli attacks the idea that

fortune is itself an independent force. Borrowing from the Quattrocento humanist Leon

Battista Alberti, Machiavelli compares fortuna “to one of those violent rivers which,

when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and buildings, lift earth from

42 For example, Newell, “How Original Is Machiavelli?,” 612-34. Newell persuasively

argues that Machiavelli’s skeptical and deflationary stance toward luck distinguishes him

from his Quattrocento humanist predecessors. Newell also shows that Skinner incorrectly

attributes this distinctively Machiavellian perspective on fortuna to Renaissance

humanism as an intellectual tradition. Even so, Newell does not object to Skinner’s

account of Machiavelli’s own views on fortuna. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern

Political Thought, 156. See also Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 190; Strauss, Thoughts

on Machiavelli, 222-53. Of course, others have argued—unpersuasively in my view—

that Machiavelli deferred to the power of fortuna as an external force. See Parel,

Machiavellian Cosmos; and Viroli, Machiavelli, 21-24. At the same time, and as we will

see, the fact that Machiavelli doubts the power of fortuna to bring about change by itself

is perfectly compatible with the view that luck looms large in political life.

17

this part, drop in another. . .” (P 25).43 For Alberti, men survive fortuna’s flood by

swimming in the direction of the current or, better yet, by climbing into boats provided

by God to the virtuous.44 Machiavelli offers a contrasting perspective:

it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for [flooding

rivers] with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a

canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging. It happens

similarly with fortune, which demonstrates her power where virtue has not

been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she

knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her. (P 25)

For Machiavelli, fortune represents the ambiguous relation of nature to human

happiness prior to the emancipation of efficacious human power over and against nature.

Although the flooding of the river might appear to be bad luck, Machiavelli urges the

reader to see it as a natural and necessary event that admits of prediction and control to a

great extent. By implication, then, luck is an epistemic phenomenon. Indeed, in Chapter

25 of The Prince, the appearance of luck might seem to be epiphenomenal to human

agency altogether. As Claude Lefort puts the point, “if we judge Fortune to be sovereign,

it holds us in fact beneath its power, and we are dispossessed of our freedom; if we rely

on our own strength, it diminishes, and the area of our freedom and knowledge

43 Both Pitkin and Newell have persuasively established the link between the occurrence

of this image in Alberti and Machiavelli. See Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 143; Newell,

Tyranny, 290-91.

44 Alberti, “Three Dialogues,” 35-38.

18

increases.”45 Thus luck remains a moving target, since the appearance of either good or

bad luck seems to vary with the capacities of agents to foresee and to control both

external circumstances and their own characters.

Less familiar than this reading of Machiavelli on fortuna is the fact that Aristotle

offers a similarly skeptical and deflationary account of the idea of luck. For many

scholars of Aristotle, Aristotle uses the idea of luck to refer to a cause of motion or

change on par with those of both nature and deliberate human action. For example,

Nussbaum uses the phrase “external happening” to pick out instances of good or bad luck

throughout her interpretation of Aristotle’s thought in The Fragility of Goodness.46

Likewise, in Jill Frank’s treatment of the ideas of luck, necessity, and agency in

Aristotle’s political thought, she writes that “what happens by accident is independent of

human agency.”47 And Cynthia Freeland concludes from her reading of Aristotle’s

Physics that luck is an “objective feature of reality.”48

As I interpret Physics 2.4-6 in Chapter 2, however, the idea of luck refers to a

description of action rather than to a cause of it. In particular, we will see that, on the

Aristotelian account, the idea of luck (tuchē) refers to a description of an ostensibly

unpredictable and uncontrollable outcome that also appears to have a striking influence

45 Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 195.

46 For example, Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 10, 317, 332.

47 Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 40. Frank follows Frede, “Necessity, Chance, and

‘What Happens for the Most Part,’” 197-220.

48 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 70.

19

on human flourishing (Phys 2.5.197a26-27). In this way Aristotle hives off the more

human-focused concept of “luck” from impersonal chance (automaton), with which he

identifies unpredictable, uncontrollable outcomes in nature—the proverbial tree falling in

the forest, for example (Phys. 197a36-197b20). According to Aristotle, moreover, the

idea of luck is a type of “contingent explanation” (aitia kata sumbebēkos) as opposed to

an “intrinsic explanation” (aition kath’ hauto; Phys. 2.5.197a1-10). In my view, which I

will explain in Chapter 2, the idea of luck is itself contingent because the unpredictable

outcomes that strike us as lucky or unlucky elicit an indefinite range of explanations that

reflect our own interests, emotions, or background knowledge. In calling these

explanations contingent, Aristotle draws on his more general notion of contingency (to

kata sumbebēkos)—the conjunction of one or more elements or events in an unusual way

that is not self-explanatory and could have been otherwise (see Phys. 2.2.193b27-28).

Aristotle’s nuanced conceptual vocabulary therefore provides a useful first cut at the

ideas of luck, chance, and contingency, and it can shed light on the less self-conscious

usages of these ideas today.49 When I use these words throughout the dissertation, I have

in mind their Aristotelian definitions, at least as starting points.

Aristotle’s account of tuchē is also useful, I will argue, because it brings to light

the twofold significance of luck understood as a piece of folk wisdom. On the one hand,

49 For example, many people view luck and chance as distinct causal agents. Friedland,

shows, persuasively, that it is common to view luck as (potentially) a good thing that

attaches to particular people (for example, a gambler). Chance, by contrast, is often held

to be simply uncontrollable. See Friedland, “On Luck and Chance,” 267-82.

20

Aristotle’s definition of luck as a contingent explanation preserves and illuminates the

common-sense usage of luck. Human beings invoke the idea of luck when the outcomes

of their actions appear to have come about irrespective of their own deliberations,

especially when these outcomes either satisfy or thwart their choices in ways both

spectacular and uncontrollable (Phys. 2.5.197a5-6). On the other hand, Aristotle follows

pre-Socratic philosophers such as Democritus and Empedocles by arguing that luck does

not count as a cause in its own right—that luck itself causes nothing (Phys. 2.5.197a10-

12). In Chapter 2, then, I will suggest that Aristotle offers a kind of “phenomenology” of

luck, even as he defends the philosophic view that the motions of human beings and of

the natural world admit of determinate explanations in every case.

Furthermore, while Aristotle uses the idea of luck to refer to an imprecise and

even chaotic set of phenomena, his conceptual vocabulary still clarifies the kinds of

outcomes that we routinely call lucky or unlucky. Note that Aristotle uses the idea of luck

to refer to outcomes that are both strikingly unpredictable and uncontrollable. This

definition improves upon existing philosophical accounts; as we have seen, many of these

accounts identify either unpredictability or uncontrollability as luck’s single defining

feature. For example, Williams argues that it is a matter of luck whether a hypothetical

Gauguin realizes his dream of becoming a famous painter, precisely because the result of

the project is unpredictable.50 In response, an Aristotelian would point out that the

outcome of Gauguin’s project depends, to a great extent, on actions that he controls

through his deliberations and daily activities. Whether Gauguin becomes a famous

50 Williams, Moral Luck, 117-127.

21

painter may be unpredictable, but it is hardly uncontrollable, and it therefore cannot be

considered a matter of luck alone.51 Conversely, whereas Nussbaum, Nagel, and others

define luck as what is uncontrollable, it would be strange to say that all uncontrollable

events happen by luck: neither tomorrow’s sunrise nor one’s inevitable death are lucky or

unlucky, because they are both perfectly predictable. Thus the criteria of unpredictability

and uncontrollability together define luck better than either criterion on its own.

Yet Aristotle’s approach to the idea of luck leaves at least one important question

unanswered. How do human beings come to identify certain events (but not others) as

strikingly unpredictable and uncontrollable and hence as instances of good or bad luck?

With this question in mind, Dean Hammer has written that “we can understand luck

definitionally as an unanticipated occurrence, but that does not get us very far. . . . My

suggestion is that we can better understand chance as a cultural construction. Which

events we pay attention to and the meaning we assign to those occurrences are

51 Indeed, what would Gauguin think in retrospect? Surely not that his success was just

lucky. Although he could argue that it was (once) unpredictable, because he does not

regret the outcome of his action, Aristotle would say that Gaugin is responsible for it. See

NE 3.1.1110b18-20 and my reflections on regret, voluntariness, and responsibility in

Chapter 2. Also recall the “four systematic sources of unpredictability in human affairs”

laid out by MacIntyre; my Aristotelian criticism of Williams applies to MacIntyre as

well. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 90-100.

22

determined by the culture in which we live.”52 Attending to the role of luck in

Thucydides’ History supports Hammer’s cultural approach to luck even as it suggests a

refinement of it.53 For Thucydides, the idea of luck inheres in intellectual beliefs and

psychological orientations that are fundamentally shaped by the regime. Through his

depiction of the Athenian and Spartan regimes at war, Thucydides illuminates the

contrasting civic discourses that inform his characters’ conceptions and perceptions of

good and bad luck.54 But for Thucydides himself, luck is not out there in the world. As

52 Hammer, “The Cultural Construction of Chance in the Iliad,” 126. Hammer takes

inspiration from Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture. For a likeminded analysis of

“cultural models” of tuchē and moira in the classical Greek context, see Eidinow, Luck,

Fate, and Fortune, 9.

53 Hammer’s focus on the cultural significance of luck, as opposed to its political

significance, may be suited to the Iliad insofar as that text antedates the advent of politics

strictly speaking.

54 I follow Orwin in supposing that “Thucydides shows us the self-revelation of the cities

of Athens and Sparta . . . the significance of the war lies above all in this process of self-

revelation.” Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 193; see also 10-11. That the Athenian and

Spartan regimes each possess characteristic discourses on the idea of luck has been

argued, persuasively, by Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 3, 89-90, and passim. But

cf. Zumbrunnen, who explores the dissonances and variations within Athenian and

Spartan outlooks, in addition to the ways in which actions redound upon and reshape the

characters of these two cities. Zumbrunnen, Silence and Democracy, 73-94. The fact that

23

Geoffrey Hawthorn has remarked, and as we will see for ourselves, “it is not he but his

characters who speak of tuchē.”55

Like Machiavelli and Aristotle, then, Thucydides views luck as an epistemic

phenomenon. Yet, for all that, and precisely because of its psychological significance,

luck plays a critical role in the evolution of the war. Whereas Aristotle offers a

“phenomenological” account of luck, Thucydides’ approach to luck is “political-

phenomenological.” However, commentators on Thucydides from Adam Parry to

Williams have missed this point; and in Thucydides’ profound dramatizations of

perceptions of good and bad luck in political life they have discovered only the banality

that rationality is, in the words of Williams, “at risk to chance.”56 These Thucydidean

the Sicilian expedition came to ruin under the leadership of Nicias, whose perspective on

tuchē resembles that of Archidamus as much it resembles that of Pericles, proves the

importance of eschewing a monolithic picture of Athens in particular. On this point, see

Connor, Thucydides, 41. I will try to be sensitive to the tensions and ambiguities within

Athenian perspectives on luck in Chapter 4.

55 Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics, 235.

56 Although the line is enigmatic, Williams appears to make the trite point that events

such as the plague can disrupt the best-laid plans and end lives. Williams, Shame and

Necessity, 163-64. Even before Williams, Parry had argued in his influential dissertation

that tuchē refers in the History to the most “incalculable” aspect of “external reality.”

Parry, Logos and Ergon in Thucydides, 181-82, 186, 192.

24

scholars join the Aristotelian scholars mentioned above in presenting bad luck as a

compulsory external force that crushes human agency altogether.

In fact, however, Thucydides’ deflationary and regime-focused approach to the

idea of luck can help us to pose more sharply the central questions about luck and

responsibility that preoccupied Williams himself. If luck is not in fact out there in the

world, then in what situations, if any, is it appropriate to appeal to bad luck as an excuse

that nullifies ethical responsibility? In addition, since perspectives on good and bad luck

are shaped by the regime, how do these perspectives bear on problems of specifically

political responsibility? Do the responsibilities of political leaders or citizens change

when they encounter circumstances that they themselves regard as extremely unlucky?

Not only Thucydides but also Aristotle and Machiavelli offer surprising, searching, and

unfamiliar reflections on these questions, and in so doing they can help us to gain critical

distance on the treatment of these questions among post-Kantian political theorists today.

Luck, Responsibility, and Justice

Luck is a central element of contemporary debates in philosophy and political theory

concerning problems of moral responsibility and distributive justice. For example, G.A.

Cohen presents the opposition between a just distribution and a lucky one as axiomatic:

“anyone who thinks that initial advantage and inherent capacity are unjust distributors

thinks so because he believes that they make a person’s fate depend too much on sheer

luck.”57 Yet, why is it unjust for a person’s fate to depend too much on sheer luck?

57 Cohen, “On the Currency,” 932.

25

Underlying Cohen’s view is a certain view of just deserts: no one deserves what happens

to him by chance. In the words of Dworkin: “That crucial boundary between chance and

choice is the spine of our ethics and morality, and any serious shift in that boundary is

seriously dislocating.”58 The morality that Dworkin dubs “ours” is, more precisely,

Kantian morality. For Kant, the value of morality consists in the rational purity of the

good will.59 The good will is pure in the sense that its goodness cannot be infected in any

way by what Kant calls “contingency.”60 Rather, the goodness of the good will is wholly

determined by the agent himself, when he chooses to self-legislate the universal moral

law. It follows, for Kant, that contingent events themselves have no moral value.61 When

contemporary political theorists assume that what happens by chance is necessarily

“arbitrary from the moral point of view,” they are drawing upon a Kantian conception

moral responsibility, especially its dismal view of luck.62

58 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 444.

59 See Kant, Groundwork, 17.

60 For example, see Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 69.

61 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 19. But cf. Athanassoulis, Fortune’s Web, 100-34.

Athanassoulis shows that Kant theorizes the role of habituation in moral life in ways that

Williams, for example, did not acknowledge. Still she grants Williams’s central

contention—that Kantian morality as a realm of ultimate value excludes luck.

62 Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, 1; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., 221-27.

26

It was precisely in order to attack the Kantian (and Rawlsian) view of agency and

moral responsibility that Williams first proposed the idea of “moral luck.”63 Whereas

Kantian morality64 identifies the putatively unconditioned act of willing as the only

legitimate source of moral responsibility, Williams, Nagel, Nussbaum, and others have

shown that it is commonplace and correct to subject to ethical judgment agents whose

actions or identities appear to have been influenced by luck.65 While not every instance of

luck counts as moral luck, since there exist both extenuating circumstances and freak

accidents, theorists of moral luck have struck blows against Kantian approaches by

revealing the existence of at least three types of moral luck—circumstantial luck,

resultant luck, and constitutive luck.66 Concrete examples show that we experience

63 Williams, “Moral Luck,” 116-17, 126-30.

64 Williams audaciously dubs Kantian morality “the peculiar institution” in Ethics and the

Limits of Philosophy, 174. See Pippin’s reflections on this coinage in “Williams on

Nietzsche and the Greeks,” 166-67.

65 The main works in this literature I have already mentioned more than once: Williams,

“Moral Luck”; Nagel, “Moral Luck”; Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness; Statman, ed.,

Moral Luck; Athanassoulis, Fortune’s Web. But the literature is now vast, and it extends

into disciplines other than analytical philosophy. For an article in political theory (with a

critical bent) that draws upon the idea of moral luck, see Breiner, “Democratic

Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral Luck,” 550-574.

66 Nagel provides the earliest taxonomy in his “Moral Luck.” Note, though, that in

addition to circumstantial luck, resultant luck, and constitutive luck, Nagel includes a

27

ethical emotions ourselves, and elicit the ethical judgments of others, on account of

actions undertaken in lucky or unlucky circumstances (circumstantial luck), on account of

actions issuing in lucky or unlucky effects (resultant luck), and even on account of

aspects of our own identities that seem to have arisen through good or bad luck

(constitutive luck). That the appearance of luck does not by itself nullify ethical

responsibility is a welcome insight: it would be quixotic, and perhaps dangerous, to

attempt to conquer luck absolutely and without qualification.67

Without saying so explicitly, Williams implied that the idea of moral luck harkens

back to Greek political thought and literature.68 And he was right: Thucydides’ History,

among other texts, contains rich and paradigmatic episodes of moral luck. For example,

in 427 B.C., the Athenians decreed the execution of the entire Mytilenean citizenry as

punishment for its attempt to revolt from the Athenian empire (3.36.1-2). Having

regretted the cruelty of their decision, however, the Athenians voted on the following day

to revise it, sparing the Mytilenean demos. Yet, since Athenian triremes carrying the first

decree had already left, albeit reluctantly, for Mytilene, Thucydides says that it was “by

fourth category—causal luck. This fourth category is unhelpful since actions that are

influenced or determined by antecedent causal conditions are either not instances of luck

at all or they fall within the categories of circumstantial or constitutive luck. Nagel,

“Moral Luck,” 146-49; and Statman, “Introduction,” 5-21.

67 Many contemporaries do harbor such quixotic hopes. Again, see Arneson, “Luck

Egalitarianism—A Primer,” 43-44.

68 For example, Williams, Shame and Necessity, 67-74.

28

luck” (kata tuchēn) that a second set of triremes encountered no contrary winds and was

therefore able to arrive in the nick of time to stop the massacre (3.49.3; cf. 7.2.4).69

The Mytilenean episode evokes moral luck of the resultant type: were it not for a

confluence of contingent factors, such as the direction of the wind and the dilatoriness of

the first set of triremes, the Athenians would have executed the Mytilenean demos.

Compared to the Spartans, whose execution of the Plataeans Thucydides juxtaposes to

the Athenians’ pardon of the Mytilenean people (see 3.68), the Athenians appear to have

eschewed indiscriminate and violent revenge, at least in the end.70 But how different the

Athenians would have appeared—and rightly so—had the message of reprieve failed to

arrive in time! In that case, it would have been appropriate to judge the Athenians

responsible—causally, ethically, and politically—for the annihilation of Mytilene

altogether, as they were responsible for the atrocities committed at Scione (5.32.1) and

Melos (5.116). Such a drastic change in our ethical judgment of the Athenians seems to

hinge on luck—hence the paradox of “moral luck.”

69 On “turning points,” “hinge moments,” and “counterfactuals,” in Thucydides’ History,

see Hornblower, Thucydidean Themes, 7-11; Eidinow, Luck, Fate, and Fortune, 141;

Tordoff, “Counterfactual History and Thucydides,” 101-121; Stahl, Man’s Place in

History, 82-96.

70 “The Mytilenean episode, however, is not to be viewed in isolation. The first part of

the third book develops a parallelism between the events on Lesbos and the continuing

siege of Plataea.” Connor, Thucydides, 91.

29

In fact, though, the treatment of these issues found in Greek political thought is

superior to Williams’s own theoretical framework. William’s main point is negative: he

wants to show that the Kantian theory of moral responsibility is dishonest, stultifying,

and ultimately wrong.71 But he himself does not fully outline a theory of responsibility to

rival the one found in the Kantian tradition.72 Aristotle provides a complex theory of

voluntary action and ethical responsibility that can accommodate the moral luck insight.

As I argue in Chapter 2, Aristotle’s account of voluntary action and ethical responsibility,

put forth in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, employs a precise explanatory framework that

identifies the self-conscious origination of the action by the agent as the sine qua non of

71 “Williams fashions himself a debunker, who sets out to unmask the self-delusional

picture of human beings as autonomous, self-legislating agents.” Balot, “Recollecting

Athens,” 104.

72 In Shame and Necessity, his most theoretical work, Williams outlines “the basic

elements of any conception of responsibility”: “cause, intention, state, and response.” But

he goes on to write that “there is not, and there never could be, just one appropriate way

of adjusting elements to one another . . . just one correct conception of responsibility.”

This statement is true in one sense: different areas of human experience demand different

conceptions of responsibility (e.g., ethical as opposed to legal responsibility). Is it not

possible and necessary, though, to attempt to define these various conceptions of

responsibility? See Williams, Shame and Necessity, 55-74.

30

ethical responsibility (NE 3.1.1111a21-24).73 In Aristotle’s own words: “Since what is

involuntary is that which is the result of force and done on account of ignorance, what is

voluntary would seem to be something whose origin is in the person himself, who knows

the particulars that constitute the action” (NE 3.1.1111a21-24). Aristotle’s attention to the

origins of action enables him to show that agents knowingly initiate many actions that

might seem to occur in lucky or unlucky circumstances or to issue in lucky or unlucky

effects. By contrast, only those actions originating in either external force (bia) or in non-

culpable ignorance (agnoia) are simply involuntary in his view (NE 3.1.1110a1-2). By

doing justice to Aristotle’s expansive account of responsibility in the subsequent chapter,

I provide a more solid theoretical basis for the idea of moral luck, even as I argue against

contemporary scholars, such as Terence Irwin, Susan Sauvé Meyer, and many others,

73 “For Aristotle, to be responsible for an action is a clear-cut, factual matter of the

action’s origins: if it was originated by any of an agent’s desires, or a decision, taken

together with its thought, then it is voluntary and the agent is responsible for it.” Cooper,

“Aristotelian Responsibility,” 296. Cooper succeeds in correcting anachronistic, Kantian

approaches to Aristotelian responsibility by showing that choice is not the primary locus

of responsibility for Aristotle; nor is Aristotle obsessed with questions of moral praise

and blame. Still, I will ultimately criticize his exclusive focus on the so-called causal

picture, that is, the antecedent conditions of action. I engage throughout Chapter 2 with

both Cooper and Nussbaum; see Fragility of Goodness, 28-30, 43, 282-89, 328-42, 380-

81; “Equity and Mercy,” 90-91. While Nussbaum is attuned to the role of luck in NE 3.1,

she offers a surprisingly moralistic interpretation of Aristotelian responsibility.

31

who assimilate Aristotle to Kant by locating in the Nicomachean Ethics a theory of

specifically moral responsibility.74

Thucydides also supplies a useful corrective to Williams. Williams grounds the

existence of moral luck in his observations about actual practices of praise and blame and

ordinary emotional reactions to actions apparently influenced by good or bad luck

without sufficiently acknowledging that these practices and emotions could be confused

or overly punitive. Thucydides lays bare various pathologies of thinking about the issues

of luck and responsibility in democratic Athens—pathologies that I will track and explain

in Chapter 4.75 On the one hand, the Athenians often glorify and take credit for the

unpredictable and contingent results of their deeds, as they did after their lucky victory at

74 Irwin, “Reason and Responsibility,” esp. 134; Meyer, Aristotle on Moral

Responsibility; Bobzien, “Choice and Responsibility in Nicomachean Ethics iii 1-5,” 85;

Furley, “Aristotle on the Voluntary,” 60; Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency, 192-93.

75 “What must have appeared to the disgruntled Athenians as an external force, the bad

luck which brought the plague, appears to Pericles a subjective phenomenon, namely,

their anger, from which he must try to dissuade them. Pericles regards the individual soul

as the locus of chance; and he seems to deny implicitly that the city as a whole can be

seriously affected by chance.” Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 71. In this passage

Edmunds puts forth a beautiful statement of the political-psychological approach to luck

found in Thucydides. Yet his conclusion doesn’t follow: precisely because Pericles

grasps that the individual soul is the locus of chance, the city can be seriously affected by

it. Thus Chapter 4 both builds on and departs from Edmunds.

32

Pylos (see 4.65.4). On the other hand, the Athenians characteristically blame their own

leaders for the unlucky results of actions that they voted for themselves and even for

extreme instances of bad luck for which no human being could reasonably incur political

responsibility (e.g., 2.65.3, 4.65, 8.1.2). As a ubiquitous rhetorical topos that is brought to

bear on issues of ethical and political responsibility, the idea of luck may be abused more

often than it is well-used.

Even so, we will see that Aristotle, Thucydides, and Machiavelli anticipate

Williams insofar as they deny that the apparent influence of bad luck on either the

circumstances or the effects of action necessarily excuses what the agent has done. As

regards political responsibility in particular, Aristotle will suggest the critical point that

founders and statesmen are ineluctably vulnerable to both circumstantial and resultant

luck. These extraordinary political actors necessarily confront contingencies of

circumstance that defy prediction, mastery, and choice; should they seek to lay long-

lasting foundations, moreover, the effects of their deeds will also outstrip their power to

foresee or to control them.

In addition, Machiavelli addresses the deepest problem posed by the moral luck

theorists—that of constitutive luck. Although many scholarly authorities have argued that

the Machiavellian prince tightly controls his own character and even changes his nature

freely and at will,76 I argue that character of the prince is shaped by fortune in

76 See, for example, Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 167; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s

Virtue, 36-8; McIntosh, “The Modernity of Machiavelli,” 190; Newell, Tyranny, 303-34;

Strauss, Thoughts Machiavelli, 252-3, 297-8.

33

Machiavelli’s own view. As Machiavelli puts the point in the opening line of “The Life

of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca,” “those who have done very great things, and who

have been excellent among the men of their era, have in their birth and origin been

humble and obscure, or at least have been beyond all measure afflicted by Fortune.”77 In

Chapter 3, with Machiavelli as my guide, I explore this paradoxical possibility and its

political ramifications.

In sum, precisely because luck does not exist out there in the world, the areas of

apparent good or bad luck and the areas of responsible human action are overlapping and

cross-cutting. Blurring the lines between various types of responsibility and good or bad

luck also means that one should neither defer to bad luck nor rely on good luck, since

luck itself is a moving target that is often compatible with responsible agency. What,

then, defines efficacious human agency in a world that might seem to be rife with

contingency and luck?

Political Agency in the Face of Contingency

Although political theorists have been eager to theorize political systems that conquer

luck as a matter of justice, they have been much less eager to explore, and to leave

standing, the problems posed by the appearance of luck for political actors. Nor have the

moral luck theorists undertaken this task. With the possible exception of Williams’s

77 Trans. Gilbert. See Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 533.

34

reflections on “necessary identities” and “political structures” in Shame and Necessity,78

theorists of moral luck more or less neglect the role of luck in political life. Rather,

theorists of moral luck, who almost uniformly belong to the tradition of Anglo-American

analytical philosophy, parse out individual types of moral luck as these apply to

individual agents.79 But in a world in which we find no pure wellspring of human

agency—no Kantian will, shining like a jewel—it is likely that external and internal

contingencies will affect human beings in concurrent and dynamic ways. It may not even

make sense to begin with attention to individuals in contradistinction to the larger

structures that shape identities. The literature on moral luck could be both complemented

and challenged by further reflection on political contingencies.

Just as theorists of moral luck largely abstract from political phenomena, so too

they fail to explain the practical import of their reflections. While Williams is right to

complain, in a Nietzschean register, that contemporary moral philosophy is dishonest and

escapist to the extent that it does not face up to “bad news,”80 we are left to wonder what

a more truthful encounter with luck gets us. Is there nothing more to say about luck

78 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 103-29, 162-67. Note that the theme of moral luck is

absent from Williams’s political writings collected in the posthumous In the Beginning

Was the Deed.

79 For the argument that Anglo-American analytical philosophy is a tradition that should

be understood in light of its own peculiar history, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 12-22.

80 Bernard Williams, “Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” 52. See also Williams, Shame and

Necessity, 161-64; Didion, Year of Magical Thinking, 172-74.

35

beyond the fact that human lives and endeavors, however rational or good, are vulnerable

to disaster? On the contrary, the idea that luck refuses to be mastered by human beings is

a truism found not only in Thucydides, whom Williams praises for this insight, but also

in many other ancient Greek thinkers, from Herodotus to Sophocles, not to mention

moderns and even so-called post-moderns, from Machiavelli to Weber to Rorty.81 As

MacIntyre has argued, supposing that luck is ineradicable does not preclude inquiring

into why and how human beings encounter luck in various areas of their experience;

rather, respect for the idea of luck makes such an inquiry necessary.82

I aim to reveal unfamiliar and specifically political problems related to luck as

these problems emerge in the writings of my chosen authors. For example, Machiavelli

argues that the most extraordinary political actors prove to be not only externally but also

internally vulnerable to luck. Because the virtuosi are children of chance, whether a state

manages to discover the right leader at the right time is, even for Machiavelli’s Rome,

largely a matter of luck (e.g., D 3.9). A fortiori, a city’s very existence can hang on

apparent good or bad luck; as we have seen, the salvation of Mytilene depended on

various contingent factors in Thucydides’ own view. Aristotle, for his part, shows in

Book 5 of the Politics that unpredictable and largely uncontrollable shifts in the

81 For example, Herodotus, History 1.29-33, 3.40, 7.10; Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus

1186-96, and Ajax 485-86; Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 4-7, 25-31; Rorty,

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity esp. 31, 51, 60. For my reading of Machiavelli, see

Chapter 3.

82 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 105.

36

composition of the regime can trigger civic strife or even regime change. Indeed,

Aristotle frequently invokes the common-sense view of luck in the Politics because this

idea does justice to the political experience of both ordinary citizens and extraordinary

political leaders, for whom the political world frequently presents itself as a welter of

external circumstances and surprising consequences that, in combination with human

action, can produce the most extraordinary political changes.

On the one hand, then, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Thucydides reveal unfamiliar

problems posed by the appearance of luck in political life. On the other hand, each

thinker theorizes political agency in light of these problems—as he must, in fact, since

each also casts luck as agency’s shadow, rather than as a distinct phenomenon in and of

itself. In particular, I argue that these thinkers effect a trans-valuation of the virtue of

practical wisdom, modifying it in light of the problems posed by the appearance of luck

in politics.83 They also consider, more broadly, how the appearance of luck can elicit the

expression of other virtues of character, such as courage, in addition to delusive

emotions, such as hope and fear. Examining the dynamic relation between political

agency and contingency is the ultimate aim of this project.

83 I am in dialogue with the political theory literature on practical wisdom and judgment,

and especially the literature that is rooted in Greek political thought. For example, Beiner,

Political Judgment, esp. 72-97, 118-19; Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 84, 92-101,

109-10, 121, 124-26; Ober, “Democracy’s Wisdom,” 104-22; Ruderman, “Aristotle and

the Recovery of Political Judgment,” 409-420; Salkever, Finding the Mean, 75, 138-142,

257-58.

37

Through the examination of the idea of luck in Aristotle’s Physics, Nicomachean

Ethics, and Politics, Chapter 2 yields lessons about Aristotelian practical wisdom. In the

Politics, Aristotle aims to educate the practical wisdom (phronēsis; Pol. 4.1.1289a13) of

legislators and statesmen by explaining the true origins of political change that lie

beneath the appearance of either good or bad luck (e.g., Pol. 5.3.1303a3-14). At the same

time, however, Aristotle uses the idea of luck to bring home to the extraordinary political

actor the limits of his own practical wisdom. Political leaders might acquire self-

knowledge by both exploring the outer reaches of their foresight and control and by

envisioning irregular and destructive calamities that could otherwise overwhelm their

practical wisdom in the event.

Machiavelli’s chief concern is with this latter problem: how can princes and

whole states eschew intoxication in good fortune and abjectness in bad? On my reading

of The Prince, the Discourses, and other minor works, such as “The Life of Castruccio,”

Machiavelli suggests that the experience of serious misfortune can push the princely

individual to develop the kind of virtue that will enable him to think straight and to

remain self-sufficient no matter the appearance of good or bad luck. Paradoxically, then,

bad luck is good luck, because the experience of bad luck can bring home to the virtuoso

the necessity of prudence.84 In its Machiavellian definition, prudence refers to a quasi-

84 This argument challenges many prevalent interpretations of fortuna in Machiavelli’s

thought. Most of these interpretations exaggerate the power of Machiavellian virtue,

whether princely or republican, to control fortune. Moreover, the internal vulnerability of

the prince to the shaping power of fortune has not been explored. In addition to the

38

Stoical quality of intellectual self-reliance—albeit divorced from the ethical ends, such as

justice or honestas, that guided prudence according the Stoics themselves. In the

Discourses, moreover, Machiavelli shows that the prince can imprint his prudent

character on the people by educating them and by managing their emotions in warfare.

Not only “great men” but also “strong republics” eschew “becoming insolent in good

fortune and abject in bad” (D 3.31.3). With Machiavelli, ordinary people enter the scene,

and we begin to consider the possibility of a politics in which many citizens exercise

efficacious agency in the face of contingency.

As I argue in the fourth and final chapter, Thucydides offers a rich example of a

democratic politics in which the idea of bad luck looms large and supplies a reason for

the cultivation and expression of both deliberative rationality and daring. More precisely,

Thucydides’ Pericles emphasizes the Athenian-democratic virtues of deliberative

rationality (gnōmē) and daring (tolma), especially as responses to apparent good or bad

luck (e.g., 1.140.1, 2.43.5, 2.64.6). Influential interpreters of Thucydides have caricatured

Pericles’ speeches on these topics. For Lowell Edmunds, among others, Pericles

“trivializes” and “disparages chance,” on the grounds that bad luck can be reduced to

avoidable human error.85 Yet these scholars have not recognized that Pericles in fact

interpretations of Skinner, Pocock, Strauss, Mansfield, and Newell, all cited above, see,

for example, McCormick, “Addressing the Political Exception,” 888-900; Benner,

“Machiavelli’s Amoral Fortuna,” 481-99.

85 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 17, 71, 74; see also 43, 81, 144. See also Orwin,

Humanity of Thucydides, 25 n. 28, 170; Forde, Ambition to Rule, 60; Foster, Thucydides,

39

elaborates a complex view of deliberative rationality that is explicitly suited to the

possibility and indeed the likelihood of bad luck in war. Moreover, since Pericles

theorizes the complex and synergistic relationship between deliberative rationality and

daring as distinctively Athenian-democratic virtues, he provides a rich picture of a

democratic politics of luck that has both intellectual and ethical dimensions.

True, as we will see, Thucydides is a critic of Periclean Athens. The Athenians

repeatedly fell short of the ideal of Periclean deliberative rationality, allowing the

appearance of good luck in particular to inflame their hope and to corrupt their

deliberative practices. Even so, Thucydides marvels at Athenian daring: although the

Athenians certainly required statesmen such as Pericles to manipulate their emotions in

many situations, they also exhibited appropriate fear and incredible energy in the face of

disasters that they themselves regarded as extremely unlucky (see 2.65.12, 7.28, 8.1.4).

What is more, Thucydides himself embodies a virtue that resonates with the Athenians’

own democratic political culture—self-critical honesty about the past. Strikingly,

Thucydides exposes self-serving speeches that invoke luck as a rhetorical topos, and he

thereby holds up for the judgment of the reader reversals of fortune that have been

mendaciously excused, mythologized, or punished.

Together with Machiavelli and Aristotle, Thucydides issues an untimely challenge

to citizens and political theorists today. On the one hand, these writers lead us to doubt

the characteristically “modern” presumption that we have “arrived at a point where

Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism, 205; Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity,

35-37, 47; Monoson and Loriaux, “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” 289.

40

constraint can be routed, or at least reduced as far as possible,” especially in political

life.86 On the other hand, they can also help us to rethink political agency. Thucydides’

paradoxical suggestion is that an honest and appropriately fearful regard for bad luck

could contribute to both daring and deliberation among democratic citizens.

86 Visser, Beyond Fate, 1.

41

CHAPTER 2: THE IDEA OF LUCK IN ARISTOTLE’S THOUGHT

What is luck (tuchē)? This is the central question of Book 2, Chapters 4-6 of Aristotle’s

Physics—the starting point of my inquiry.1 Cynthia Freeland has identified two

contrasting interpretations of this text in particular and of the idea of luck in general.2 On

the one hand, “causal realists” such as Freeland herself contend that the idea of luck

refers to an objective feature of reality—namely, to an “accidental cause” (aitia kata

sumbebēkos) of motion or change (Phys. 2.5.197a5, 33). 3 Freeland returns to the Stagirite

1 Translations of the Physics refer to Apostle, trans., Aristotle’s Physics. I have modified

Apostle’s translations as necessary, having consulted the Greek of the Oxford text, edited

and revised by Ross. Modifications may also reflect the helpful translations and

commentaries of Charlton, trans., Aristotle’s Physics: Books I and II; Hope, trans.,

Physics. “Luck” is the most common translation of tuchē; automaton, of “chance.” For

justifications of these translations, see Judson, “Chance,” 73-74, and my own discussion

of the Aristotelian vocabulary of luck in Chapter 1.

2 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” esp. 68-71; see also Freeland, “Plot Imitates Action.”

3 In addition to Freeland, causal realist interpreters of the Physics include Dudley,

Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, esp. 27-31; Judson, “Chance,” 97-99; Matthews,

“Accidental Unities”; Meyer, “Aristotle, Teleology, Reduction,” 798-803. For the most

recent treatment of these issues, see Allen, “Aristotle on chance as an accidental cause.”

Essential pre-modern commentaries are those of Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s

Physics; and Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 2. On these texts, see also Lang,

Aristotle’s Physics and Its Medieval Varieties.

42

because on her reading of the Physics “accidental causes are really ‘out there’ in the

world, since intrinsic causal relations and accidental unities in which they are grounded

are objective features of reality.”4 As we have seen, many influential theorists of luck

implicitly subscribe to the “causal realist” view. When Martha Nussbaum defines luck as

“external happening,” when Ronald Dworkin uses the idea of “brute luck” to refer to

wholly unpredictable events that befall agents no matter what they know or do, each

theorist supposes that luck refers to phenomena that are “really ‘out there’ in the world.”5

On the other hand, Freeland argues against what she calls the “pragmatist” view

of luck. For pragmatists, the idea of luck refers to an explanation or an interpretation of

an unpredictable outcome.6 Freeland correctly associates the pragmatist approach with

those Aristotelian scholars who argue that Aristotelian aitiai refer to explanations rather

than to causes.7 For example, Julia Annas writes that Aristotle’s “examples of X’s

4 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 69-70. See also Meyer, “Aristotle, Teleology,

Reduction,” 798-99: “it is a fact in rerum natura whether the causal relation between two

entities is intrinsic or accidental.”

5 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 334; Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of

Resources,” 293. In addition, see Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 38.

6 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 62. Freeland’s exemplar of the pragmatist approach is

van Fraassen, The Scientific Image. For a recent and notorious book on the topic of luck

that also fits Freeland’s definition of pragmatism, see Taleb, Black Swan.

7 See Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 49-51; Barnes, Posterior Analytics, 89-90; Annas,

“Inefficent Causes,” 319; Charlton, trans., Aristotle’s Physics, 98-104; Hocutt,

43

standing as an aitia to Y include: the bronze to the statue; the ratio 2:1 to the octave; the

planner to the deed; the aim of health to walking (Physics 194b23-35). These cannot all

be causes without absurdity. . . . It is a great improvement to cease thinking of an aitia as

a cause and to treat it instead as an explanation, a ‘because.’”8

Interestingly, Annas and other exponents of the “explanation” approach have not

examined Aristotle’s account of luck as an aitia kata sumbebēkos.9 My reading of

Physics 2.4-6 will show that, for Aristotle, the idea of luck indeed refers to an explanation

or an interpretation as opposed to a cause. More precisely, the idea of luck is invoked

when an unexpected outcome appears to have a striking effect on human flourishing in

the eyes of some agent or observer. Luck interests Aristotle—and it should interest us—

“Aristotle’s Four Becauses,” esp. 385-87; Moravcsik, “Aristotle on Adequate

Explanations”; Schofield, “Explanatory Projects”; Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame,

69; Stein, “Causation and Explanation in Aristotle,” 705. The reevaluation of the concept

of aitia in Aristotle’s philosophy arguably originated with Vlastos, “Reasons and Causes

in the Phaedo.” Equally influential is Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium.

8 Annas, “Inefficient Causes,” 319; see also Moravcsik, “Aristotle on Adequate

Explanations,” 3-6.

9 One possible exception is Sorabji’s Necessity, Cause, and Blame. Yet Sorabji argues,

unconvincingly, that coincidences are wholly undetermined according to Aristotle (e.g.,

x-xi, 139). In my view, Aristotle’s epistemic approach to luck is perfectly compatible

with the possibility that apparently lucky or unlucky outcomes have determinate origins

and explanations.

44

primarily because invocations of luck lay bare the epistemic limitations and ethical

orientations that lead human beings to invest unexpected outcomes with extraordinary

significance.

Aristotle’s epistemic approach to the topic of luck in the Physics has important

implications for his ethical thought.10 When one ceases to think of luck as a cause that

determines human action in the manner of an external force, then it is possible to see that

many actions that might seem to be influenced by luck in fact originate in agents

themselves. Consequently, whereas many contemporary commentators suppose that the

influence of luck on human action usually nullifies ethical (and legal) responsibility,

Aristotle argues, especially in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, that agents remain responsible for

all actions that they themselves knowingly initiate (NE 3.1.1111a22-23)—even those

actions that may appear to have been undertaken in lucky or unlucky circumstances or to

10 Lennox rightly argues that “in Aristotle’s ethical writings, chance plays a crucial role

in determining responsibility for an action. It would seem, then, that a proper grasp of his

considered doctrine of chance, which is worked out in Ph II 4-6, is central to the

evaluation of a number of areas of his philosophy.” Lennox, “Aristotle on Chance,” 52.

To be clear, I do not assume that Aristotle’s account of the idea of luck in the Physics

informs his remarks on luck in the Nicomachean Ethics or in any other work. Instead I

approach the treatments of luck in the Physics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Politics

each on its own terms—though I find a significant degree of consistency among them.

45

have issued in lucky or unlucky effects (e.g., NE 3.1.1110a4-14).11 Aristotle thereby

illuminates the ethical seriousness of agency and the task of practical wisdom: to

deliberate and to act in accordance with the particulars of the situation, and to take

responsibility for one’s own actions.

The lessons about luck, responsibility, and practical wisdom that I tease out of

Physics 2.4-6 and NE 3.1 shed light on Aristotle’s political thought in turn. In the

Politics, Aristotle aims to educate the practical wisdom (phronēsis; Pol. 4.1.1289a13) of

legislators and statesmen by explaining the true origins of political change that lie

beneath the appearance of either good or bad luck (e.g., Pol. 5.3.1303a3-14).12 At the

same time, Aristotle frequently appeals to the common-sense idea of luck (e.g., Pol.

11 Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Nicomachean Ethics refer to Bartlett and

Collins, trans., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. My own translations and transliterations

refer to the Greek edition of Bywater, Ethica Nicomachea. Even Nussbaum argues,

surprisingly, that the influence of luck on the circumstances of action often nullifies both

ethical and legal responsibility; see especially “Equity and Mercy,” 91; Fragility of

Goodness, 334-35. A more promising approach to Aristotle’s treatment of these issues in

the Nicomachean Ethics can be found in Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility.” Cooper’s

key insight is that Aristotle theorizes responsibility for actions, not specifically moral

responsibility.

12 Translations of Aristotle’s Politics refer to Lord, trans., Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd ed. In

certain cases, I favor instead Keyt, trans., Aristotle: Politics Books V and VI. My own

translations and transliterations refer to Newman, ed., The Politics of Aristotle.

46

7.12.1331b21-22); in so doing, he aims to clarify the task of political leadership. On the

Aristotelian account, the responsibility of the political leader to shape the regime through

the exercise of practical wisdom extends beyond his power fully to predict or to control

the circumstances or the effects of his deeds.13

The Idea of Luck in Physics 2.4-6

Interpretations of Aristotle’s account of luck (tuchē) in Physics 2.4-6 hinge on the

translation and analysis of the phrase aitia kata sumbebēkos; for Aristotle defines the idea

of luck as “an aitia kata sumbebēkos of things done according to choice and for the sake

of something” (kata prohairesin tōn heneka tou; Phys. 2.5.197a5-6). The most common

translation of this phrase is “accidental cause,” a rendering that tacitly supports

Freeland’s “causal realist” reading. True, this translation is rooted in an influential

13 Attending to the idea of luck therefore clarifies Aristotle’s stance toward political

reform and therewith the practical import of the Politics. Aristotle is neither a

(progressive) “social democrat” nor a “conservative.” Cf. Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social

Democracy”; Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics, esp. 84-85, 199. Aristotle’s

point, rather, is that the task of political reform is as necessary and worthwhile as it is

fraught with contingency and peril. Some commentators have noted that Aristotle both

affirms political agency while simultaneously revealing the risks and uncertainties

endemic to political life—even if they have not focused on this productive tension.

Especially worthwhile are the reflections found in Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 143-44;

Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 139-40; Salkever, “Whose Prayer?,” 39-42.

47

philosophical tradition: for Platonic and Christian commentators such as Simplicius and

Aquinas, the aition kata sumbebēkos is an accidental cause because it is a property

inherent in the substance that comprises the aition kath’ hauto, the intrinsic cause.14

Yet, in my view, rendering aitia kata sumbebēkos as “accidental cause” is neither

precise nor sound. A better translation, following Jonathan Barnes, would be “contingent

explanation.”15 The superiority of the “explanation” translation emerges through

14 Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 2, 97; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics,

101-103; Dudley, Aristotle on Chance, 30. For Machiavelli’s appropriation of the

Thomistic language of substance and accident, see McCormick, “Machiavelli’s

‘Accidents,’” 888-889. On Aristotle’s usage of both the feminine noun aitia and the

neuter substantive adjective aition, see Jaume Casals and Jesús Hernández Reynés, “A

Note on the Use of aitia and aition,” 89-95.

15 “‘Explanation’ and its cognates render aitia and its cognates. . . . Roughly speaking, to

give an aitia for something is to say why it is the case, and X is an aitia of Y provided that

Y is because of X. . . . The standard English translation is ‘cause’ (with its cognates); but

in many contexts this is false, or at any rate seriously misleading.” Barnes, Posterior

Analytics, 89-90. “The man sitting over there is Socrates expresses an accidental identity,

according to Aristotle; for it is at best an accident—a contingent truth—that Socrates is

sitting. . . .” Barnes, “Review of Edwin Hartman,” 59, cited in Mathews, “Accidental

Unities,” 228. Putting these two passages together, one arrives at “contingent

explanation” as a possible translation of aitia kata sumbebēkos. This translation conveys,

crucially, that what is contingent is the explanation itself rather than a property inherent

48

examination of Aristotle’s concrete examples. Consider the classic example found in

Physics 2.5: while the aition kath’ hauto of the house is the art of building, the aition kata

sumbebēkos refers to an indefinite (aoriston) number of contingent facts about a

particular builder of a particular house, including his complexion and musical ability (Ph.

2.5.196b24-29).16 For Freeland, the builder’s musicianship counts as an accidental cause

of the house because his musicianship indirectly figures into the causal story of the

house’s genesis.17 More precisely, the builder’s musicianship is a property inherent in the

substance (i.e., the builder himself) that performed the efficient-causal work of

building.18 But this argument is mysterious: does the builder’s musicianship actually

contribute to the construction of the house in any meaningful way?

In fact, Aristotle’s point is that there is no explanatory connection between the

construction of the house and the fact that the builder knows how to play music. Richard

Sorabji writes that “accidents are unusual conjunctions of items whose association is not

self-explanatory.”19 Indeed, for Aristotle, it is possible to associate an indefinite number

in a substance. Note that while many commentators translate aitia as “explanation,”

Barnes employs this translation throughout his rendering of the Posterior Analytics.

16 Aristotle uses this same example, with slight variations, at Met. 6.2.1026b35-1027a2.

17 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 55-58.

18 See also Allen, “Aristotle on chance,” 76-77; Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action,

46; Copi, “Essence and Accident,” 164-65; Dudley, Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, 30.

19 Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 5. Sorabji follows Kirwan, Aristotle:

Metaphysics, 180-82.

49

of contingencies with any one thing: “the intrinsic explanation of something is definite

(hōrismenon), but the contingent explanation is indefinite (to de kata sumbebēkos

aoriston), for limitless (apeira) contingencies may belong to a thing” (Phys. 2.5.196b28-

29). Because it would be absurd to hold that an indefinite number of properties might

count as causes of some definite state of affairs, Aristotle cannot view the aition kata

sumbebēkos as a cause.

Rather, the aition kata sumbebēkos is an epistemic phenomenon. Consider that

Aristotle excludes contingent explanations from scientific knowledge (epistēmē): “it is

obvious that no science deals with the contingent; for every discipline deals either with

that [which is] always or with [that which is] for the most part” (Met. 6.2.1027a20-22).20

To explain the purposive motions of nature in the Physics, Aristotle employs four types

of intrinsic explanations: “since the explanations are four, it is the task of the physicist to

understand all of them; and as a physicist he should state the why by referring to all of

them—the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final” (Phys. 2.7.198a22-24).21 By

20 Kirwan, trans., Aristotle: Metaphysics, 71.

21 “In saying that there are four kinds of aitiai, Aristotle is saying that the question, why

something is the case, can be answered in four mutually irreducible ways, giving four

different types of explanation. And since explanation is an epistemological notion, we

can see why Aristotle thinks that to know a thing you must know its aitiai and why in the

Posterior Analytics aitiai are given middle terms in demonstrative syllogisms which set

out perspicuously the achievements of scientific knowledge in per se predications.”

50

contrast, Aristotle shows that a contingent explanation works as an explanation only in

the case that the person who receives it understands certain pieces of contextual

information.22 For example, if there happened to be two builders living in the same town,

and of the two only one played music, then it would be useful to explain the construction

of a new house by saying, “the musician built it.” Without this background knowledge,

however, the explanans would be disconnected from the explanandum; the explanation is

contingent for precisely this reason.

Why, then, does Aristotle cast the idea of tuchē as a type of contingent

explanation? His chief example of luck as an aitia kata sumbebēkos is that of a creditor

who happens to meet his debtor in the marketplace and consequently recovers his debt.

Aristotle explains that while the creditor “would have gone to a certain place for the sake

of getting the money, had he known; but he went here not for the sake of this; and it just

happened (sunebē) that he got the money when he went there; and this happened neither

for the most part (epi to polu) whenever he went there nor of necessity” (ex anankēs;

Phys. 2.5.196b34-197a1). Commentators who subscribe to the causal realist approach

find themselves tasked with identifying the accidental and intrinsic causal pairing in this

example. John Dudley writes that “the per se or fundamental cause—assimilated by

Aristotle to a substantial cause—of collecting the debt is then seen as the cause in the

mind of the man which made him go to the market-place, while the accidental cause of

Annas, “Inefficient Causes,” 319. See also Moravcsik, “Aristotle on Adequate

Explanations,” 6.

22 See Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 5.

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collecting the debt is the mental recognition of the significance of the coincidental

meeting with his debtor.”23 Others argue that the “accidental cause” is not the recovery of

the money but rather the creditor’s decision to go to the market in the first place.24

In Aristotle’s own view, however, the creditor-debtor example shows that “the

aitiai of things which might come to be by luck (an genoito to apo tuchēs) are of

necessity indefinite” (aorista; Phys. 2.5.197a9-10). Precisely because there is no apparent

link between the creditor’s decision to pass through the marketplace and his recovery of

the debt, Aristotle argues that “in going to a place and getting the money . . . the

contingent explanations might be a great many, such as wishing to see someone or

following someone or avoiding someone or going to see a play” (Phys. 2.5.197a15-19).

The idea of luck falls within the category of the contingent explanation because the

unpredictable outcomes of human action that we call lucky or unlucky elicit an indefinite

range of contingent explanations rather than a defined set of intrinsic explanations: “since

the explanations are indefinite luck too is indefinite” (Phys. 2.5.197a21). In other words,

we recur to luck as a contingent explanation when an unpredictable outcome seems to

lack intrinsic explanations.

To be sure, the apparent unavailability of intrinsic explanations and the

corresponding invocation of the idea of luck does not mean, as Richard Sorabji has

23 Dudley, Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, 35-36.

24 See Meyer, “Aristotle, Teleology, Reduction,” 802-803; Charlton, Aristotle’s Physics,

107; Bolotin, An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics, 37.

52

argued, that what happens by luck is altogether undetermined.25 Aristotle clearly

vindicates both the common opinion that that lucky or unlucky outcomes are inscrutable

and the more philosophic view that strictly speaking all motions of nature and human

action admit of precise and determinate explanations. In Aristotle’s own words: “luck

seems to be something indefinite and inscrutable to man (adēlos anthrōpō), and yet there

is a sense in which nothing would seem to come to be by luck (ouden apo tuchēs doxeien

an gignesthai); for both opinions are correct” (Phys. 2.5.197a10-12). But how can

Aristotle save both endoxa—the opinion of “the many” and that of “the wise,”

respectively (see Phys. 2.4.195a36-196b6)?

The solution lies in Aristotle’s view of luck as a type of explanation, as an

epistemic phenomenon.26 With the so-called many, Aristotle observes that human beings

invoke the idea of luck when the outcomes of their actions appear to have come about

irrespective of their own deliberations, especially when these outcomes either satisfy or

thwart their choices in ways both spectacular and uncontrollable (Phys. 2.5.197a5-6).27 In

particular, the idea of luck often attaches to the special class of unpredictable and

uncontrollable outcomes that seem to have an extraordinary impact on human flourishing

25 See Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 139.

26 See Ross’s apt formulation in Aristotle, 90: “chance is not an operative cause but only

a name for a certain kind of connexion between events.”

27 “Chance is not a disturbance of the natural order, it is just that in the affairs of men,

events occur which look as though they have occurred for a certain purpose when they

have not.” Lear, The Desire to Understand, 37.

53

(Phys 2.5.197a26-27).28 Aristotle’s examples of lucky or unlucky outcomes in the

Physics and the Metaphysics include, in addition to the recovery of the debt, various

coincidences that save lives or destroy them. Walking to fetch water after eating a salty

meal, a man is murdered at the well (Met. 6.3.1027b3-1027b13). Another person happens

to discover a kidnapping victim—perhaps a member of his own family—and frees him

by paying the ransom (Phys. 2.8.199b20-25). Finally, the shovel of a gardener strikes

something solid, namely, buried treasure (Met. 5.30.1025a15-19). Like the plots of

comedies or tragedies, these actions turn on unexpected reversals that yield or ruin

prosperity and provoke the characteristic tragic response of wonder, pity, and fear.29

28 See also NE 7.13.1153b25: the “definition” (horos) of “good luck” (eutuchia) is

“relative to flourishing” (pros tēn eudaimonian). Dudley points in this direction when he

writes, somewhat ambiguously, that chance is both “coincidental” and “meaningful” for

Aristotle. See Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, 33-37.

29 True, in the Poetics, Aristotle might seem to say that tragic action should not hinge on

luck alone. On closer examination, however, he in fact praises tragic plots that feature

unlucky turnabouts of precisely the kind theorized in the Physics: “Since tragic mimesis

portrays not just a whole action, but events which are fearful and pitiful, this can best be

achieved when things occur contrary to expectation yet still on account of one another. A

sense of wonder will be more likely to be aroused in this way than as a result of the

simply arbitrary or fortuitous, since even what happens by luck make the greatest impact

of wonder when they appear to have a purpose (as in the case where Mitys’ statue fell on

Mitys’ murderer and killed him, while he was looking at: such things do not seem to

54

Aristotle thus saves the common opinion that luck is strikingly mysterious and

unpredictable (paralogos), even as he implicitly rejects the equally common view that

luck is something “godlike” (hōs theiōn; Phys. 2.4.196b6).

At the same time, Aristotle eventually defends a deflationary view of luck that he

had initially attributed to pre-Socratic, atomist philosophers such as Empedocles and

Democritus: “there is a sense in which nothing would seem to come to be by luck” (Phys.

2.5.197a12; cf. 2.4.196a1-35).30 From the fact that human beings often fail to discover

non-contingent explanations of a unexpected outcomes, it hardly follows that such

explanations do not exist: “luck is an explanation only contingently (estin aition hōs

sumbebēkos hē tuchē); but as an explanation without qualification, it explains nothing”

(Phys. 2.5.197a13-14; see also Met. 5.3.1025a23). Because, in the words of Charlton,

“the same thing under one description may have a definite and proper [explanation], and

under another be due to [luck],” the appearance of good or bad luck actually invites the

search for more determinate explanations.31 Even so, Aristotle departs from Empedocles

happen without reason). So then, plot structures which embody this principle must be

superior” (Poetics 1452a1-10). I have slightly modified the translation of Halliwell, The

Poetics of Aristotle, 42.

30 See also Cicero, De Fato 39, in which Cicero groups together Aristotle, Empedocles,

Democritus, and Heraclitus on the grounds that each of these thinkers holds that

everything that happens happens of necessity.

31 Charlton, Aristotle’s Physics, 108. Where Charlton writes “cause” and “chance,” I have

written “explanation” and “luck.” Note that even among contingent explanations, it is

55

and Democritus in a crucial respect: while the atomists had denied that luck refers to a

cause in its own right, they had simultaneously maintained, perhaps confusedly, that the

formation of the universe occurred by luck.32 Aristotle limits the idea of luck to the

domain of human action: “luck is necessarily an explanation of what may happen through

action” (praxis; Phys. 2.6.197b1-2). Hence Aristotle’s account of luck is thoroughly

anthropocentric, whereas the atomists had transformed luck into a cosmic starting point.

In sum, Aristotle’s investigation of luck saves the phenomena. On the one hand,

Aristotle emphatically rejects the causal realist view that “accidental causes are really

‘out there’ in the world.”33 The undefined field of luck varies instead with the intellectual

and ethical dispositions that observers bring to bear on ostensibly unpredictable

outcomes. On the other hand, for all that the idea of luck is used to refer to an imprecise

and even chaotic set of phenomena, Aristotle’s epistemic approach to the topic clarifies

the kinds of outcomes that we routinely call lucky or unlucky. Those outcomes that

appear unpredictable to the point of being uncontrollable and which also have a striking

effect on human flourishing elicit the idea of luck as a contingent explanation. Equally

clear to Aristotle that some are “nearer than others” (allôn eggutera; Phys. 2.5.197a25);

for example, when a sick person makes a miraculous recovery, his most recent medical

procedure is a more likely explanation than the sun or the wind (Phys. 2.5.197a22-25).

32 On the atomistic account of the origins of the universe, see Bailey, The Greek Atomists

and Epicurus, 139-43. Cf. Plato, Tim. 69c.

33 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 69-70.

56

important, Aristotle’s epistemic approach emphasizes the fact that because it is a

contingent explanation the idea of luck masks underlying intrinsic explanations.

As a final point, consider that Aristotle also examines unpredictable outcomes of

non-human nature or necessity (as opposed to the unpredictable outcomes of human

action), for which he reserves the concept of chance (automaton; Phys. 197a36-197b20).

In a striking image, Aristotle depicts a man who has been struck by a falling stone: “the

stone fell not for the sake of striking the man, but by chance (apo tou automatou), seeing

that it might have been thrown by someone for the sake of striking the man” (Phys.

2.5.197b31-33). Notice that this central example assimilates chance to luck: Aristotle

suggests that the idea of chance is invoked when an unpredictable natural occurrence

appears as if it might have occurred through deliberate human action.34 From beginning

to end, Aristotle’s treatment of luck and chance situates these ideas against the

background of the human choice and flourishing.

True, Aristotle’s presentation isn’t simply anthropocentric insofar as he contrasts

what happens by chance and luck with the teleological motions of nature: “chance and

luck are posterior to intellect and nature” (Phys. 198a9-10). Yet for Aristotle this point is

obvious. The chance genesis of a six-fingered man is the exception that proves the rule:

nature tends to realize certain ends and therefore demands explanation in light of those

ends. The more interesting point is that the idea of luck should not be dismissed as a form

of “insignificant speech,” to borrow a memorable line from Hobbes, since this idea has a

34 Again, see the parallel passage at Poetics 1452a6-8; also Bolotin, An Approach to

Aristotle’s Physics, 39.

57

hold on human beings, even though it is hardly necessary in order to explain what

happens in non-human nature or in the cosmos.35 As long as we remain the credulous

creatures that we are, the idea of luck will appeal to us—and we to it.

Luck and Responsibility for Actions in NE 3.1

Having examined Aristotle’s analysis of luck in the Physics, we are now in a positon to

grasp the role of luck in NE 3.1—a crucial and well-known passage in which Aristotle

distinguishes between the voluntary (hekousion) and the involuntary (akousion) and

establishes conditions of responsibility for actions.36 For Aristotle, the apparent influence

35 Hobbes, Leviathan, 7.

36 NE 3.1 has attracted extensive commentary in the critical literature, in which one finds

multiple approaches to Aristotle’s discussion of responsibility. For many commentators,

Aristotle puts forth a theory of specifically moral responsibility. See Bobzien, “Choice

and Responsibility in Nicomachean Ethics iii 1-5,” esp. 85; Furley, “Aristotle on the

Voluntary,” 60; Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency, 192-93; Irwin, “Reason and

Responsibility,” esp. 134; Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility. Other scholars have

emphasized Aristotle’s dialogue with Athenian legal thought and practice: for example,

Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 288-295; Curren, “The Contribution of

Nicomachean Ethics iii 5 to Aristotle’s Theory of Responsibility.” For yet another camp,

the key point of reference is Plato, especially the Socratic paradox that no one does

wrong knowingly or voluntarily: Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 62-67;

Roberts, “Aristotle on Responsibility for Action and Character,” 23-36. The most

58

of luck on action does not necessarily render action involuntary or nullify the agent’s

responsibility for the action. Since the idea of luck refers to a contingent explanation of

action rather than to a cause in its own right, Aristotle shows that agents knowingly

initiate many actions that might seem to occur in lucky or unlucky circumstances or to

issue in lucky or unlucky effects. By contrast, those actions originating in either external

force (bia) or in non-culpable ignorance (agnoia) are simply involuntary (NE 3.1.1110a1-

2). It follows on the Aristotelian account that human beings can be considered

responsible for many actions that they may regard as seriously lucky or unlucky. As we

will see, by expanding the domain of responsible action to include actions that might

seem to have been influenced by luck, Aristotle offers an education in both practical

promising approach, in my view, is that of Cooper, who argues that Aristotle theorizes

causal rather than moral responsibility; see Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility.” I

engage throughout with both Cooper and Nussbaum; see Fragility of Goodness, 28-30,

43, 282-89, 328-42, 380-81; “Equity and Mercy,” 90-91. While Nussbaum is attuned to

the role of luck in NE 3.1, she offers a surprisingly moralistic interpretation of

Aristotelian responsibility. Finally, for analysis of issues of voluntariness, responsibility,

luck, and error in the Eudemian Ethics as well as the Nicomachean Ethics, see Anthony

Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will; and in particular Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 56-

75, for its analysis of tuchē in the penultimate chapter of the EE.

59

wisdom and the ethical seriousness of agency that could serve virtuous individuals and

legislators or statesmen seeking to educate citizens to virtue (see NE 3.1.1109b34-5).37

Aristotle divides NE 3.1 into two parts that correspond to the two criteria of

involuntary action: the first treats actions influenced by external force (bia) or

compulsion (anankē), whereas the second focuses on actions undertaken out of ignorance

(agnoia). In the first part, Aristotle chiefly devotes his attention to so-called “mixed”

(miktai) actions that appear to be at once voluntary and compulsory (NE 3.1.1110a13);

these are tough cases that “admit of dispute” (NE 3.1.1110a9). More precisely, while

Aristotle grants that external force nullifies voluntariness and hence responsibility for the

action in the case that “the person who is acting or undergoing something contributes

nothing (mēden sumballetai), for example, if a wind, or people have control over

someone, should carry him off,” he also examines mixed actions that seem to originate in

both the agent himself and in compulsory external circumstances (NE 3.1.1110a2).

Aristotle’s examples include a captain who throws his cargo overboard during a storm in

order to save his ship and a citizen whose family has been seized by a tyrant and

37 In addition to the fact that NE 3.1 bears directly on the question of responsibility for

actions apparently influenced by luck, another reason for moving from Physics 2.4-6 to NE

3.1 is the etymological link between aitia and aitios, explanation and responsibility. Lionel

Pearson writes that the word aitia “has the active meaning of ‘accusation’ ‘complaint’

‘grievance’ and the corresponding passive meaning ‘guilt’ ‘blame’ ‘responsibility’; and by

logical development it also means ‘that which is responsible’. . . .” Pearson, “Prophasis

and Aitia,” 205. Cf. Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 32-38.

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threatened with harm unless the man agrees “to do something shameful” on the tyrant’s

behalf (NE 3.1.1110a5-10).

Commentators have reasonably invoked the idea of luck when analyzing these

examples. Cooper writes that “the situation [of the ship’s captain] . . . was unlucky; he is

the victim of misfortune.”38 Likewise, of the man in the grip of the tyrant, Cooper writes

that “he too is the victim of bad luck: the misfortune of falling, with his family, into the

clutches of a tyrant.” For Martha Nussbaum, “bad luck” can push an individual to do

“things that he or she would never have done but for the conflict situation. . . . The so-

called ‘mixed actions’ are such cases.”39 By unpredictably frustrating the choices of the

actors involved and even threatening to ruin their lives altogether, the circumstances of

mixed actions call forth the idea of bad luck as Aristotle defines it in the Physics.

Does the apparent influence of bad luck on the circumstances of mixed actions

nullify either the voluntariness of these actions or the agents’ responsibility for them? On

the contrary, in the situations of bad circumstantial luck faced by the ship’s captain and

the man threatened by the tyrant, Aristotle finds that each man “acts voluntarily, for in

fact the origin (archē) of the movement of the parts that serve as instruments in such

actions is in the person himself; and in those cases in which the origin is in the person

himself, it is also up to him to act or not to act” (NE 3.1.1110a13-18). Precisely because

38 Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 284. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle himself

invokes the idea of luck in his discussion of a ship that has been blown off course,

arriving in Aegina rather than in Athens (Met. 5.30.1025a26-29).

39 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 38.

61

he does not conceive of luck as something out there in the world, Aristotle looks for more

concrete explanations of actions that elicit the idea of luck as a contingent explanation.

One such explanation lies in the origin of the action: the apparent influence of bad luck

on the circumstances of action is outweighed by the consideration that the action

originated in the agent who acted knowingly. John Cooper puts the point well: “For

Aristotle, to be responsible for an action is a clear-cut, factual matter of the action’s

origins: if it was originated by any of an agent’s desires, or a decision, taken together

with its thought, then it is voluntary and the agent is responsible for it.”40 Aristotle’s own

summary statement at the conclusion of NE 3.1 supports Cooper’s reading: “Since what

is involuntary is that which is the result of force and done on account of ignorance, what

is voluntary would seem to be something whose origin is in the person himself, who

knows the particulars that constitute the action” (NE 3.1.1111a21-24).

Scholars who attempt to find in NE 3.1 a theory of specifically moral

responsibility are troubled by Aristotle’s insistence on the voluntariness of mixed actions.

According to David Bostock, for example, “missing from the discussion is what we call

‘mitigating circumstances,’ where the agent is to be blamed, and perhaps punished, for

what he did, but the blame or punishment is to be lessened in recognition of the fact that,

in the circumstances, it would have been difficult, but not impossible, for him to have

done what is right.”41 Similarly, Terence Irwin modifies Aristotle’s theory so that the

opportunity and capacity for “effective decision” emerges as the sine qua non of moral

40 Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 296.

41 Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 107.

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responsibility.42 By implication, on Irwin’s proto-Kantian reading of NE 3.1, whenever

luck significantly impedes on the circumstances of action, then the agent in question did

not enjoy his usual freedom to deliberate; consequently, he should not be subjected to

ethical judgment.43 Susan Sauvé Meyer makes this point explicit: for Meyer’s Aristotle,

“voluntary actions must be performed non-accidentally” insofar as voluntary actions must

display the “moral character” of the agent.44 Because Meyer also supposes that mixed

actions are performed accidentally rather than through deliberate choice, she concludes

that “it is inappropriate to blame the agent” for mixed actions.45

While Aristotle grants that no one would choose a mixed action for its own sake

(NE 3.1.1110a19), he simultaneously maintains—contra the moral responsibility

reading—that actions ostensibly influenced by bad circumstantial luck can give rise to a

range of ethical judgments, including (but not limited to) praise or blame (epainountai

and psegontai; NE 3.1.1110a20-24). Aristotle himself praises the captain who jettisons

his cargo in order to save his ship; thus the captain exhibited his intelligence (nous; NE

3.1.1110a13). Aristotle also suggests that one might praise the man threatened by the

42 See Irwin, “Reason and Responsibility,” 132, 134, 143.

43 Irwin, “Reason and Responsibility,” 143, where Irwin confirms that his reading is self-

consciously proto-Kantian: “Aristotle . . . finds the power of self-determination in the

capacity for effective decision, not in uncaused acts of will. He offers an alternative

answer to Kant’s question which avoids Kant’s libertarian metaphysics.”

44 Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility, 113-14.

45 Ibid., 117.

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tyrant should he refuse to inform on his fellow citizens; for “people are sometimes even

praised (epainountai), whenever they endure something shameful (aischron) or painful in

return for great and noble things” (NE 3.1.1110a20-22). Conversely, Aristotle blames

Alcmaeon of Euripides’ lost play for offering the “laughable” excuse that he was

compelled to kill his mother (NE 3.1.1110a26-27). Yet, for Aristotle, mixed actions need

not give rise to praise or blame in every case. “Forgiveness” (suggnōmē) is more fitting

“whenever someone does what he ought not to do because the matters involved surpass

human nature” (NE 3.1.1110a30).46 Whereas many commentators assume that NE 3.1

outlines universal conditions of moral responsibility, Aristotle in fact adduces ordinary

judgments of praise and blame as evidence of the voluntariness of the actions that elicit

these judgments.47 What NE 3.1 contains is a theory of responsibility for actions, not a

46 Thus Bostock’s worry about mitigating circumstances misses the mark: Aristotle is not

arguing that all voluntary actions and hence all mixed actions must elicit either praise or

blame. Moreover, Aristotle’s comment on forgiveness clearly shows that the idea of

mitigation is not alien to him. In any case, the discussion of mitigating circumstances is

somewhat out of place in analysis of NE 3.1, since Aristotle does not discuss legal

responsibility or punishment in this passage.

47 For example, Furley, “Aristotle on the Voluntary,” 60: “What we find in Aristotle,

then, is . . . an insistence that there is a real distinction between voluntary and involuntary

actions, such that moral categories are relevant to the former but not to the latter.”

64

theory of moral responsibility.48 The key point made in the first half of NE 3.1 is that

mixed actions undertaken in the face of circumstances ostensibly influenced by bad luck

are voluntary, while actions wholly determined by external force are involuntary.

In the second half of NE 3.1, Aristotle goes on to examine actions that miscarry

through ignorance of the particulars that constitute the action. When an agent acts as he

acts because he lacks knowledge of an important feature of the situation through no fault

of his own, then his action is involuntary. In Aristotle’s own words: “since there may be

ignorance about all these things that constitute an action, he who is ignorant of any them

is held to have acted involuntarily” (NE 3.1.1111a15-16). Observe Aristotle’s examples

of actions motivated by ignorance of the particulars: Merope mistakes her son for the

enemy and nearly kills him; a fencer wounds his partner, not realizing that the blunt

button has fallen off his weapon; a doctor does not see that the usual remedy for an

illness will not save this patient but will kill him instead (NE 3.1.1111a10-15). To

Aristotle’s examples of involuntary actions undertaken on account of ignorance, one

could appropriately add two examples favored by Bernard Williams—that of the lorry

driver who accidentally kills a child wandering in the road, and that of Oedipus, who of

course committed multiple crimes through ignorance.49 Both unexpected and lamentable,

48 See Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 265-277. The opening argument of

Cooper’s article establishes precisely this point—that Aristotle lays out a theory of

responsibility for actions.

49 Williams, Moral Luck, 28, 30; Shame and Necessity, 69.

65

actions undertaken out of ignorance of the particulars readily call forth the idea of bad

resultant luck.

One question, then, is whether Aristotle thinks that agents whose actions arise out

of ignorance of the particulars can ever be considered responsible for the lucky or

unlucky results of their actions. At first blush, Aristotle’s seems to say that every action

arising out ignorance of the particulars is involuntary. Involuntary actions of this type

contrast with the voluntary actions of vicious, drunk, or careless people, who are

somehow responsible for their ignorance (NE 3.1.1110b25-35, 3.5.1113b30-1114a2).

Whereas Plato’s Socrates argues that no one does wrong knowingly or voluntarily,

Aristotle restricts the idea of error to those who do not know what they are doing in a

particular situation.50 For Aristotle, the most important sign of involuntary as opposed to

voluntary ignorance is the agent’s own emotional response to his action after the fact:

“what is done on account of ignorance . . . is involuntary [only] when it causes the person

who acts to feel pain and regret” (akousion de to epilupon kai en metameleia; NE

3.1.1110b18-20). Pain, regret, and even “disgust” (duscherainōn) are the characteristic

emotional responses to erroneous action originating in ignorance (NE 3.1.1110b21).

Through his expression of these emotions, the agent reveals that he would not have acted

as he did if only he could have foreseen the results of his action.

How does the agent’s experience of regret indicate the involuntariness of his

action? If determining responsibility were simply a “clear-cut, factual matter of the

action’s origins,” as Cooper has argued, then the agent’s emotions ex post facto would be

50 See Plato, Prot. 345e and Laws 860d.

66

irrelevant.51 Anthony Kenny has likewise expressed confusion at the idea that “a person’s

subsequent state of mind can [reveal] whether a particular action is voluntary,

involuntary, or neither.”52 In the same breath, however, Kenny discusses a Shakespearean

example that clarifies Aristotle’s point. Having stabbed Polonius in place of Claudius,

Hamlet exults: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / I took thee for thy better,

take thy fortune.”53 Although his ignorance explains how Hamlet came to kill Polonius

rather than Claudius (or anyone else), one would not want to call his action involuntary,

because Hamlet delights in having performed it. The same might be said of Aristotle’s

creditor from the Physics: the creditor went to the marketplace ignorant of the fact that he

would meet his debtor there; yet, for the creditor, there is nothing involuntary about the

51 Thus Cooper’s fine reading of NE 3.1 still distorts Aristotle’s text insofar as Cooper

presents the origin of action in the agent as the sufficient condition of responsibility.

Aristotle does not simply focus on the antecedent conditions of action, on the so-called

causal picture. The agent’s responsibility for his action often emerges after the fact

through his emotional reaction; the presence or absence of regret can be a crucial signal

of responsibility. Nor does Aristotle seek to dispel debate about responsibility by offering

a reductionist and even simplistic account of the topic. He instead preserves the way in

which we speak and argue about complex particulars of human action, even as he insists

that these arguments and ambiguities do not lessen the burden of responsible action or

judgment. Cf. Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 289-90.

52 Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, 53.

53 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.4.32-33, cited in Kenny.

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meeting or the recovery of the money.54 When an agent himself claims responsibility for

a lucky outcome of his own action, Aristotle sees no reason to gainsay him.55

For Aristotle, then, agents incur responsibility for their resultant good luck, which

does not give rise to regret. Does Aristotle also hold that agents are responsible for

actions issuing in bad luck, even when they act involuntarily through non-culpable

ignorance of the particulars? Would Aristotle consider Oedipus, Merope, or Williams’s

lorry driver responsible for what each has done? On the one hand, Aristotle argues that

involuntary actions deserve “pity and forgiveness” in general (NE 3.1.1111a2).

Aristotle’s account of responsibility eschews punitive severity; he nowhere suggests that

errors committed through ignorance of the particulars are legally culpable.56 On the other

hand, could it possibly be the case that Oedipus bears no responsibility for his actions?

54 Certainly the creditor did not recover his money akôn insofar as this word means,

“reluctantly.” See the discussion of ordinary notions of hekousion and akousion, hekôn

and akôn, in Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility, 9-14.

55 Hence the conceptual distinction Aristotle draws in NE 3.1: “if someone’s action was

caused by ignorance, but he now has no objection to the action, he has done it neither

voluntarily, since he did not know what it was, nor involuntarily, since he now feels no

pain. . . . let his action be ‘nonvoluntary” (ouch hekôn). For since they differ, it is better

that each have his own name” (NE 3.1.1110b20-25). Nonvoluntary actions refer to those

lucky actions motivated by ignorance of the particulars for which the agent accepts

responsibility.

56 See NE 5.8.1135a28-32.

68

According to Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of Aristotelian responsibility, Aristotle would

indeed recommend a full exoneration of Oedipus. In Nussbaum’s words: “circumstances

impeded and thwarted Oedipus’s blameless activation of his character, stepping in, so to

speak, between the intention and the act and causing the intended act to have at best a

merely shadowy existence.”57 Nussbaum goes so far as to argue that “[Oedipus] is not a

parricide, because the act that he intended and chose was not the act that we have judged

him to have performed.”58 “Bad luck” excuses Oedipus for the murder of Laius;

Nussbaum assigns this conclusion to Aristotle himself.59

Yet Aristotle’s own remarks in NE 3.1 are less clearly exculpatory of Oedipus.

Most importantly, Aristotle writes that errors committed through ignorance “must still be

painful to the person in question and done with regret” (NE 3.1.1111a20). What is the

significance of the experience of regret for evaluating responsibility for actions issuing in

unlucky outcomes? On this point, Aristotle’s influence on Williams is striking. A central

passage in Williams’s “Moral Luck” can be used to gloss Aristotle’s reflections on luck,

responsibility, and regret in NE 3.1:

57 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 333.

58 Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” 90.

59 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 38; Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” 91. See also

Yack, Problems of a Political Animal, 251-49; W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility,

105: “Even if Sophocles had the will, he had no means of acquitting Oedipus of his

unintentional crimes.” In “The Ends of Tragedy,” Simon Goldhill persuasively traces the

origins of such readings to German idealism.

69

The sentiment of agent-regret is by no means restricted to voluntary

agency. It can extend far beyond what one intentionally did to almost

anything for which one was causally responsible. . . . The lorry driver

who, through no fault of his, runs over a child, will feel differently from

any spectator. . . . We feel sorry for the driver, but that sentiment co-exists

with, indeed presupposes, that there is something special about his relation

to this happening, something which cannot merely be eliminated by the

consideration that it was not his fault. It may be still more so in cases

where agency is fuller than in such an accident, though still involuntary

through ignorance.60

Williams’s quintessentially Aristotelian point in this passage is that responsibility for

actions can extend beyond voluntariness in cases of involuntary action performed through

ignorance of the particulars. For Williams as for Aristotle, regret is not merely a feeling,

but a cognitively rich emotion that displays the doer’s unique relation to the deed.61

Involuntary though an action may be, the responsible agent recognizes that he did it and

is therefore answerable for its unlucky result, at least to himself. As regards the example

of Oedipus, consider that Aristotle holds up Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as the tragedy

par excellence precisely because of the powerful recognition (anagnōrisis) and reversal

60 Williams, Moral Luck, 28.

61 Williams, Moral Luck, 28-33. On the meaning and significance of regret in classical

antiquity, see Konstan, Before Forgiveness; Fulkerson, No Regrets.

70

(peripeteia) that structure the action of this play.62 What Oedipus comes to recognize is

that he has brought about his own reversal of fortune through his deeds: although he

committed his crimes through involuntary ignorance, and although Apollo too had a role

in these actions, Oedipus still regrets them and holds himself utterly responsible for them.

Thus the drama brings home to the audience the terrible fact that Oedipus is aitios—that

his own involuntary actions, compounded by bad resultant luck, have ruined his life.63

In this way Aristotle and Williams implicitly draw an important distinction

between voluntariness and responsibility. Sarah Broadie gestures toward this distinction

when she poses the question: “Does Aristotle mean by ‘hekōn’ one who knowingly

originates (voluntary1), or one who is answerable for (voluntary2)?”64 In my view,

Aristotle defines the agent who performs a voluntary action as one who knowingly

originates the action; the “responsible” (aitios) agent, by contrast, identifies the person

who is answerable for what he has done. Aristotle’s treatment of involuntary actions

initiated on account of ignorance of the particulars shows that agents can be responsible

for certain involuntary actions that issue in lucky or unlucky outcomes—in particular,

62 See Poetics 1452a29-1452b2, 1453b1-9; Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the

Dēmos,” 297.

63 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 69: “The whole of the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful

machine, moves to the discovery of just one thing, that he did it. . . . In the story of one’s

life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has

intentionally done.” See also Balot, “Philosophy and ‘Humanity,’” 25-26.

64 Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 138, with emphasis in the original.

71

those actions that provoke regret. The set of responsible agents is therefore broader than

the set of actions that these same agents perform voluntarily.

Viewed as a whole, NE 3.1 offers at least three lessons about luck and

responsibility supported by the larger argument of the Nicomachean Ethics. First,

individuals should take responsibility for their actions, even when their actions result in

unlucky outcomes. Taking responsibility for one’s actions means being serious

(spoudaios) about what one has done. Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

portrays the serious person (ho spoudaios) as the person of consummate virtue, both

ethical and intellectual (e.g., NE 1.7.1098a7-15, 3.4.1113a32-34 and 10.6.1176b18-20).

For example, he writes that “the serious person is distinguished perhaps most of all by his

seeing what is true in each case, just as is if he were a rule and measure of them” (NE

3.4.1113a32-34). Aristotle contrasts seriousness to the readiness of most people to make

excuses for their bad behavior: “seeking refuge in words (ton logon katapheugontes),

[most people] suppose that they are philosophizing (oiontai philosophein) and that they

will in this way be serious (spoudaioi), thereby doing something similar to the sick who

listen attentively to their physicians but do nothing prescribed” (NE 2.4.1105b13-16). By

contrast, the serious person appreciates the weight of action, and he consequently

eschews hypocrisy, carelessness (NE 3.4-5.1113a32-1114a11), and even excessive levity

(NE 10.6.1176b34-1177a6).65

65 Collingwood’s contention that Aristotle’s portrait of ho spoudaios reflects “the

morality of the Greek gentleman” cannot account for the fact that, in Aristotle’s view, the

serious person pursues philosophical contemplation as the highest human activity.

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Second, Aristotelian responsibility means doing voluntarily what the situation

requires, having grasped the particulars of the situation through the exercise of practical

wisdom (phronēsis). Aristotle’s treatment of mixed actions in the first half of NE 3.1

reveals the importance of practical wisdom as a guide to action in ostensibly unlucky

circumstances. Look again at the example of the ship’s captain: Aristotle comments that

“in an unqualified sense, no one voluntarily jettisons cargo . . . but when one’s own

preservation and that of the rest are at issue, everyone who has intelligence (nous) would

do it” (NE 3.1.1110a9-11). The captain made an intelligent decision to jettison the cargo;

the appearance of bad luck in the form of the storm made this action necessary.

In NE 1.10, Aristotle explicitly elaborates this lesson about luck and practical

wisdom. In his own words, “someone who is truly good and sensible bears up under all

kinds of luck (pasas tas tuchas) in a becoming way and always does what is noblest

given the circumstances, just as a good general makes use, with the greatest military skill,

of the army he has” (NE 1.10.1100b37-1101a4). Like the general, the pilot, or any other

expert craftsman, the person of practical wisdom locates an “opportune” (kairos) course

of action even and especially in unlucky circumstances (NE 2.2.1104a9-10). In fact, the

Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, 229; Lindsay, “Aristotle’s Appraisal of Manly Spirit,”

442; cf. Mara, “Interrogating the Identities of Excellence,” 307. Mara’s response to

Collingwood—that “Aristotle treats the identity of ho spoudaios not as a premise

supporting systematic moral theory but as an ongoing question”—faces the same problem

for the opposite reason: whereas Collingwood thinks that ho spoudaios refers to the

Greek gentlemen, Mara thinks that it does not refer to any one human-type.

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general’s excellence may never be so brilliant as when he leads his troops to victory

despite being outnumbered and hemmed in by the enemy; similarly, when the ship’s

captain recognizes the necessity of jettisoning his cargo, he demonstrates his excellence

in piloting. Thus “intelligence in matters of action grasps the ultimate particular thing

(tou eschatou) that admits of being otherwise” (NE 6.11.1143b1-2)—that is, the various

contingencies of circumstance that inevitably arise in the domain of praxis.66

A third lesson follows from the second: it makes no sense simply to rely on good

luck or to succumb to bad luck, since the very meaning of good or bad luck can vary with

the virtue (or lack thereof) of the agent. Aristotle writes that when “even good luck, when

in excess, acts as an impediment—and perhaps it is not just to call this ‘good luck’

(eutuchian) any longer, for its definition (horos) is relative to flourishing” (pros gar tēn

eudaimonian; NE 7.13.1153b23-25). Because the so-called goods of fortune will entice

vicious or even akratic individuals to act in greedy or pleasure-seeking ways, the goods

of fortune will not be good for them (Pol. 7.13.1332a20-24). Conversely, the person of

practical wisdom will find opportunities to display his excellence in the face of

circumstances that many people might regard as bad luck (NE 1.10.1100b30-32).67 Hence

Aristotle’s fondness for Agathon’s quip: “art loves luck, and luck art” (technē tuchēn

esterxe kai tuchē technēn; NE 6.4.1140a20). Aristotle uses this quotation to point toward

66 See Beiner, Political Judgment, 73.

67 For these reasons, it would be too simple to argue that virtuous activity depends on the

presence of the goods of fortune in Aristotle’s own view. Cf. Kenny, Aristotle on the

Perfect Life, 84; Cooper, “Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune,” 184.

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a Machiavellian paradox: for the virtuous, bad luck can be good luck. For example, in

Aristotle’s view, the virtue of courage characteristically manifests itself in situations of

extreme risk—situations that many might characterize as unlucky (NE 3.8.1117a18-22).68

To be sure, Aristotle affirms that at the limit serious misfortune can destroy

human flourishing. This hardheaded insight explains the fundamental distinction Aristotle

draws between flourishing and virtue. While cultivation of virtue is necessary for

flourishing, virtue nevertheless “appears to be rather incomplete. For it seems to be

possible for someone to possess virtue . . . while suffering badly and undergoing the

greatest misfortunes (kakopathein kai atuchein ta megista). But no one would say that

such a person flourishes, unless he were defending a thesis” (NE 1.5.1095b35-1096a2).

The situation of Priam admits of no redemptive interpretation: whatever the more precise

explanations of the fall of Troy, Aristotle does not quibble with the common-sense view

that the bad luck ruined Priam’s life, full stop: “nobody deems happy someone who deals

with luck (tuchais) of that sort and comes to a wretched end” (NE 1.9.1100a8-9).

Note, however, that while Aristotle acknowledges that bad luck may disrupt

human flourishing, he maintains that luck cannot transform virtue into vice. True,

Nussbaum has argued that, for Aristotle, “interference from the world leaves no self-

68 See Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 321. Cf. Salkever, Finding the Mean, 79:

“bad luck or other pressures may prevent a courageous person from actually doing

courageous deeds.” It is interesting that Salkever chooses the courageous person to make

this point: paradoxically, the courageous person might consider it bad luck to live in a

time of peace!

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sufficient kernel of the person safely intact. It strikes directly at the root of goodness

itself.”69 But Aristotle himself contends, unequivocally, that virtue resists corruption,

“since [the virtuous human being] will never do things that are hateful and base” (NE

1.10.1101a1); conversely, “no one is just or moderate by luck or through luck” (dikaios

d’ oudeis oude sōphrōn apo tuchēs oude dia tēn tuchēn estin; Pol. 7.1.1323b28-29). “To

entrust the greatest and noblest thing to luck would be excessively discordant” (NE

1.9.11099b24), in Aristotle’s view, because luck does not exist in the way that virtue

exists, or even in the way that the gods may exist. Not luck itself but the belief in luck is

the crucial phenomenon for Aristotle.

Luck, Statesmanship, and Legislation in the Politics

In the Politics, as in the Physics and the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers precise

explanations of outcomes that many would explain as resulting from good or bad luck.

For example, Aristotle shows that while a sudden change in the regime may appear to

have arisen through sheer luck, it is possible to identify precise origins and explanations

of such a transformation (Pol. 5.3.1302b34-1303a13). On the Aristotelian account, the

appearance of luck masks underlying political realities that the extraordinary political

actor should attempt to understand and to take in hand. Aristotle’s deflationary account of

69 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 381. See also Yack, Problems of a Political Animal,

257-58: “human capacities are not chosen or in our control. . . . When we say that

[human goodness] is praiseworthy, we are praising something that fortune, so to speak,

has given us.” Finally, Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 77-79.

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luck can therefore be seen as part of his pedagogical project in the practical books of the

Politics—to educate the “practical wisdom” of “the good legislator and the true

statesmen,” the individuals to whom he addresses his “science of the regime” (Pol.

4.1.1288b21-1289a13).70

Moreover, in the Politics, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle combines a

deflationary approach to the idea of luck with an expansive conception of responsibility.

As we will see, Aristotle attributes the health or sickness of the regime to the actions of

its legislators and statesmen above all (e.g, Pol. 7.14.1333b37-39). Yet Aristotle also

reveals a disproportion between the responsibility of the political leader to improve the

regime and the unpredictable and largely uncontrollable circumstances or events that

might seem to shape the regime by themselves. The common-sense idea of luck retains a

central place in Aristotelian political thought: although invocations of luck tend toward

imprecision and reification in Aristotle’s own view, he uses this idea to illuminate many

of the risks and uncertainties shouldered by the political leader.

Aristotle’s discussion of stasis and regime change in the fifth book of the Politics

exemplifies his approach to the topic of luck in politics.71 Ryan Balot and Arlene

70 I see no reason to assert a fundamental cleavage separating the practical books from the

rest of the Politics.

71 What exactly is the meaning of stasis? “As Moses I. Finley notes simply and

forcefully, stasis refers etymologically only to a position; that the position should become

a party, that a party should be constituted for the purpose of sedition, that one faction

should always call forth another, and that civil war should then rage is a semantic

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Saxonhouse each have shown that Aristotle identifies injustice, whether real or perceived,

as the fundamental explanation of stasis (Pol. 5.1.1301a26-38).72 Regimes that embody

unjust distributive principles fuel greed for honor and gain. Especially in extreme

oligarchies and democracies, the powerful plunder those excluded from the regime,

spurring the oppressed to factionalize in turn (Pol. 5.5.1304b20-1305a8, 5.5.1305b40-42;

NE 8.10.1160b12-16). Alongside this general account, Aristotle lays out ten proximate

origins of stasis (Pol. 5.2.1302a39-1302b5).73 One such origin is “disproportionate

evolution whose interpretation should be sought not ‘in philology but in Greek society

itself.’ I would add that it should also be sought in Greek thought about the city. . . .”

Nicole Loraux, The Divided City, 24. Cf. M.I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient

Greece, 94; Balot, Greed and Injustice, 189-233; Josiah Ober, Athenian Legacies, 88-90,

172-73; Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 118; Marcus Wheeler, “Aristotle’s Analysis

of the Nature of Political Struggle,” 161-63.

72 Balot, Greed and Injustice, 47-49; Saxonhouse, “Aristotle on the Corruption of

Regimes.”

73 The following are the ten proximate origins of stasis according to Aristotle: “For men

are stirred up (parochunontai) against one another by profit and by honor—not in order

to acquire them for themselves, as was said earlier, but because they see others

aggrandizing (pleonektountas) themselves (whether justly or unjustly) with respect to

these things. They are stirred up further by hubris, by fear, by preeminence (huperchēn),

by contempt (kataphronēsin), by disproportionate growth (dia auxēsin tēn para to

analogon), and further, though in another manner, by electioneering (eritheian), by

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growth” of a part of the regime (Pol. 5.2.1302b3). Strikingly, Aristotle says that

disproportionate growth “sometimes occurs through luck” (dia tuchas; Pol.

5.3.1303a2).74 Reviewing wars undertaken by Argos, Tarentum, and Athens, including

the so-called Peloponnesian War, Aristotle finds that the ranks of the few were

unexpectedly diminished in these cities; consequently, the people factionalized and

pushed these regimes in more democratic directions (Pol. 5.3.1303a2-6).75 For the

[neglect of] small things, and by dissimilarity” (Pol 5.2.1302a39-1302b5). Following

Keyt, I translate “di’ eritheian” as “electioneering”; Lord has “underestimation.” But I

follow Lord in bracketing “di’ oligōrian” (negligence) because Aristotle always links

“negligence” to the following element, i.e., “small things”: “negligence” is of “small

things.” See, for example, Pol 5.4.1303b27-31 and 5.8.1308a34. This move yields ten

proximate origins of stasis—an important result, we will see, since Aristotle also

proposes ten strategies of preservation. For critical perspectives on these ten triggers, see

Balot, Greed and Injustice, 47; Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 141-44; Kalimtzis, Aristotle

on Political Enmity, 157-78; Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 122-25; Saxonhouse,

“Aristotle on the Corruption of Regimes,” 191; Weed, Aristotle on Stasis, 118.

74 Newman remarks that “the tuchai refered to [in this passage] would not have escaped

notice.” See Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 4, 303.

75 “Events at Tarentum are dated to 473, those at Argos to 494, and those at Athens to the

Peloponnesian War of 431-403, or to its first part, the Archidamian War of 431-421.”

Simpson, A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle, 374.

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people, the losses incurred by the few might have seemed to be strokes of great good

luck, while the few might have seen themselves as the victims of serious misfortune.

One wonders, though, whether Aristotle needs to mention luck in this context.

Does he not offer, at the same time, a determinate explanation of regime change through

growth of a part? Argos, Tarentum, and Athens suffered military defeats that

fundamentally altered each regime’s socio-political composition. As a direct result of

these setbacks on the battlefield, the many became increasingly preponderant and

powerful in each regime. But whatever the Athenian elites may have felt about their

losses over the course of the war with Sparta, for example, it remains unclear why they

should have viewed these losses as unlucky rather than as merely lamentable. In fact,

Aristotle goes on to suggest that each proximate cause of regime change, including

“growth of a part,” can be predicted and perhaps controlled by the extraordinary political

actor. In Aristotle’s own words: “if we have an understanding of the things that destroy

[regimes], we will also have an understanding of the things that preserve them; for

opposites are productive of opposite things, and destruction is the opposite of

preservation” (Pol. 5.8.1307b27-30). Just as Aristotle outlines ten proximate origins of

stasis and regime-change, so too he outlines ten strategies of preservation (Pol.

5.8.1307b30-1309a30)—much as Hobbes offers three “passions that incline men to

peace” to counterpoise the “three principal causes of quarrel” rooted in human nature.76

76 Hobbes, Leviathan, 76-78. See also Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 136; Nichols,

Citizens and Statesman, 101: “the remedy that Aristotle suggests against such a change in

the regime is to counter the more extreme tendencies by opposite measures.”

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By implication, then, regime change does not happen by luck, thought it may appear to

do so to those who have not been schooled in Aristotelian political science.

True, Aristotle does not establish a straightforward, one-to-one correspondence

between the origins of destruction and those of preservation.77 Preventing regime change

through growth of a part could involve promoting fears, tightening or relaxing property

assessments, and educating citizens to regime-specific virtues, for example (Pol.

5.8.1307b30-1309a30). Precisely because there exists no method of preservation, the

extraordinary political actor will need to pursue a prudent program of reform, employing

Aristotle’s advice in contextually appropriate ways. Aristotle himself announces that the

overarching purpose of the practical books of the Politics is to inculcate “practical

wisdom” (phronēsis; Pol. 4.1.1289a13) in “the good legislator and the true statesman”

(ton agathon nomothetēn kai ton hōs alēthōs politikon; Pol. 4.1.1288b27).78 Previous

inquiries into the regime, Aristotle suggests, were not “useful” (chrēsimos; Pol.

4.1.1288b37) because they focused on the best regime without at the same time attending

to the political realities that must concern the prudent political leader. While Aristotle

also maintains that the “science” (epistēmē; Pol. 4.1.1388b22) of the regime should be

oriented toward the best, as all sciences take their bearings from what is “naturally the

finest” (tō . . . kallista pephukoti; Pol. 4.1.1288b14), he simultaneously argues that

political leaders should study the complete spectrum of political realities, including the

77 Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 145.

78 See Salkever, Finding the Mean, esp. 101, 161; and NE 6.8.1141b: “the political art

(politikē) and practical wisdom (phronēsis) are the same characteristic.”

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rare and destructive. Aristotle’s “science of the regime” thus reveals various

circumstances and events that might seem to constitute good or bad luck for the regime,

but which the extraordinary political actor will perceive, less mystically, as occasions for

prudent leadership.

At this point, one might object: if Aristotle invites the political leader to take a

skeptical view of luck and to trust in his practical wisdom, then why does he invoke the

idea of luck at all in the Politics? For example, Eugene Garver worries that if Aristotle

were to identify “fortune” as a significant cause of “constitutional change,” then “we

might have the consolations of history, but Aristotelian practical science would be

impossible”; for in that case the regime itself would be the plaything of luck.79 One

possible reply to Garver is that while Aristotle does not identify luck as a cause of regime

change, he still wants to preserve the quotidian idea of luck in the Politics. Remember the

Physics: although Aristotle criticizes the widespread reification of luck as something “out

there,” he simultaneously affirms the felt-experience of the lucky or unlucky event—its

power to save a life or to destroy one. This commonplace view of luck might be

especially useful for thinking about politics. For example, Aristotle’s treatment of stasis

in Book 5 depicts an array of unforeseen crises that have the capacity to precipitate

regime change. In addition to regime change through growth of a part, Aristotle depicts

and analyzes private squabbles among elites—over a love affair, for instance, as

happened at Syracuse (Pol. 5.4.1303b21-27)—that can unexpectedly light the fuse of

79 Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 144.

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stasis and thereby produce a change in the regime.80 Although luck is not a cause of

political change in its own right, it nonetheless makes sense that the idea of luck looms

large in the minds of democratic or oligarchic partisans who find their political lives

shockingly upended through a change in the regime that brings them either prosperity or

mortal danger.

Another explanation of Aristotle’s invocations of luck in the Politics is that at a

certain level of generality political life is, paradoxically, predictably unpredictable.81 On

this point, consider Aristotle’s frequent mentions of the idea of luck in his elaboration of

the best regime. Founding the best regime would require the concomitant realization of

many unlikely circumstances; whether the founder will have access to the right kind of

citizen body or the right kind of territory, for example, defies prediction or control, at

least in part (Pol. 7.4.1325b38-1326a9). For Aristotle, “speaking about [these

contingencies] is a matter of prayer (euchēs ergon esti), having them come about, a

matter of luck” (sumbēnai tuchēs; Pol. 7.12.1331b20-22). Aristotle joins Plato’s Athenian

Stranger in supposing that the art of legislation cannot altogether master the

circumstances and events that many people would call lucky or unlucky:

I was about to say that no human being ever legislates anything, but that

luck and accidents of every sort, occurring in all kinds of ways, legislate

everything for us. Either it’s some war that violently overturns regimes

80 This example evokes the Athenian tyrannicides and Thucydides’ comments on that

episode, which I take up in Chapter 4.

81 See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 93-101.

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and transforms laws, or it’s the baffling impasse of harsh poverty that does

it. Diseases, too, make many innovations necessary, when epidemics occur

and bad weather comes and frequently lasts many years. If he looked

ahead to all these things, someone might be eager to say what I just said—

that no mortal ever legislates anything, but that almost all human affairs

are matters of luck.82

To be clear, neither the Athenian Stranger nor Aristotle says in his own name that

luck legislates everything. Aristotle writes that “we pray for the [best] city to be well

founded . . . in the matters over which luck (tuchē) has control (kuria), but the city’s

being excellent is ultimately not the work of luck, but of knowledge and choice” (ouketi

tuchēs ergon all’ epistēmēs kai prohairseōs; Pol. 7.13.1332a31-34). Yet both Aristotle

and Plato suggest that no statesman chooses his emergency, no founder his time and

place. Nor can leaders know whether their actions will have lasting effects. The

Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians reminds the reader that the regime laid down

by Solon gave way to the Peisistratid tyranny (Ath. Pol. 13-14). Thus the extraordinary

political actor seems to be vulnerable to the apparent influence of luck on both the

circumstances and the results of his actions. Although there must exist more precise

explanations of these circumstances and events, Aristotle locates in common opinion a

wise appreciation of the chanciness of politics.

What is the practical import of these reflections on luck’s place in political life?

Some commentators have supposed that Aristotle’s reflections on luck imply a

82 Plato, Laws 709a-b (trans. Pangle).

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conservative stance toward political reform. In particular, since “luck has control” over

the circumstances and materials necessary for founding the best regime, these things are

unlikely to be available unless the regime orients itself toward acquisition. But an

acquisitive regime will necessarily fall short of the best regime, which aims instead at

human flourishing through the cultivation of virtue. Mary Nichols concludes that “the

conditions necessary for political rule make its full flourishing impossible.”83 On

Nichols’s reading, by eschewing the quixotic and self-defeating project of overcoming

luck through the acquisition of the equipment necessary for the cultivation of virtue,

Aristotle orients his political science toward the preservation of extant regimes. For

similar reasons, Thomas Pangle concludes that “Aristotle’s therapeutic political science

comes to sight as having a strongly conservative aim.”84

No doubt, Aristotle offers extensive advice on the preservation of regimes,

including tyrannical regimes, which he himself regards as the worst of all regimes (Pol.

6.11.1313a18-1315b10). Even so, Aristotle assigns to the statesman and the legislator a

remarkably high degree of responsibility to improve the regime as much as possible

within the limits imposed by the materials and circumstances at hand. Aristotle nowhere

83 Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen, 164. For a similarly Platonic reading of the

Aristotelian best regime, see Salkever, “Whose Prayer?” Cf. Depew, “Politics, Music,

and Contemplation”; Ober, Political Dissent, 347-51.

84 Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics, 170. See also Yack, Problems of a

Political Animal, 275; Miller, Jr., Nature, Justice, and Rights, 306; Polansky, “Aristotle

on Political Change,” 331, n. 19; Weed, Aristotle on Stasis, 213.

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suggests that the extraordinary political actor might reasonably point to the influence of

bad luck on the circumstances or the effects of his actions for the purpose of excusing

either his regime’s ills or his own failure to remedy them. On the contrary, Aristotle’s

reflections on the uncertainties and risks endemic to politics sit side-by-side with his

expansive account of the responsibilities of the political leader. Like the man threatened

by the tyrant and the ship’s captain of NE 3.1, the political leader is responsible for acting

in the face of exigent circumstances that might seem to be influenced by bad luck.

More concretely, Aristotle argues that it is the responsibility of the legislator to set

the telos and therewith the ēthos of the regime. A regime that aims to dominate (to

kratein; Pol. 2.9.1271b2, 7.14.1333b14) other cities in war, such as Sparta, will educate

its own citizens to “attempt to pursue the capability to dominate [their] own city” (Pol.

7.14.1333b31-2)—that is, to regard tyranny as the best way of life, either consciously or

unconsciously. But Aristotle thinks “the same things are best for men both privately and

in common, and the legislator should implant (empoiein) these in the souls of human

beings” (Pol. 7.14.1333b37-39). In addition, the legislator or statesman should enact laws

that resist the regime’s self-destruction through extremism. For example, while an

oligarchic regime such as Carthage may appear to flourish “through luck,” since the

regime happened to enrich the people and thereby to satisfy them, “they ought to be free

of factional conflict through the legislator” (Pol. 2.11.1273b20-22). So too the statesman

should intervene in unfolding political events; “for to recognize an ill as it arises in the

beginning belongs not to any chance person (tou tuchontos) but rather to a statesman”

(politikou andros; Pol. 5.8.1308a33-34). On the Aristotelian account, then, regimes

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require wise founders and active statesmen who will take responsibility for the regime by

anticipating and responding to political contingencies through legislation and reform.85

Aristotle’s treatment of luck in politics therefore clarifies a productive tension that

runs throughout the argument of this chapter. On the one hand, Aristotle suggests that the

political leader should regard luck as a superficial concept: underneath the appearance of

lucky or unlucky circumstances or events lie the true origins and explanations of political

change; these the political leader should grasp through the exercise of practical wisdom.

85 Legislators and statesmen play key roles in Aristotle’s Athēnaiôn Politeia. See the

discussion of Solon in Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity, 135-38, and the

discussion of Theramenes in Frank and Monoson, “Aristotle’s Theramenes at Athens,”

29-40. More important, I think it would be difficult to deny that Aristotle himself aims to

educate statesmen and especially legislators in both the Nicomachean Ethics and the

Politics. As regards the Politics, see the passages to which I refer in this paragraph, in

addition to the catalogue of legislators at 2.12.1273b28-1274b28 and the many mentions

of the legislator in Books 7-8. As regards the Nicomachean Ethics, see especially NE

1.13.1102a7 and 10.9.1180b20-30. On this point, I depart from Jill Frank, who presents

the legislator as a “deus ex machina” to which “moderns” such as Machiavelli and

Rousseau characteristically recur in order to explain how a polity obtains good

institutions or a good character. See Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 11. While it is

true that, for Aristotle, “a city is excellent . . . through its citizens” (Pol. 7.13.1332a33),

Aristotle also expects extraordinary political actors to define excellence for their

respective cities and to preserve their cities through prudent statesmanship.

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Because luck does not determine or prevent political action in the manner of compulsion

or divine intervention, Aristotle holds the political leader responsible for his own

attempts to improve the regime—even though no statesman will fully predict or control

the circumstances or the effects of his actions. In both the Nicomachean Ethics and the

Politics, Aristotle twins his skeptical and deflationary account of luck with an expansive

approach to questions of responsibility for actions. The statesman and the legislator, if

anyone, will need to embody the characteristics of practical wisdom and seriousness that

Aristotle extols as essential to responsible agency in the Nicomachean Ethics.

On the other hand, rather than jettison the common-sense idea of luck altogether,

Aristotle preserves it and even foregrounds it. In the Politics, this move allows Aristotle

to do justice to the political experience of the ordinary citizen, whose status as a citizen,

not to mention his very life, may seem to hang on lucky or unlucky events, such as an

unexpected defeat on the battlefield that precipitates regime change. Preserving the

ordinary idea of luck also brings home to the political leader the risks and uncertainties

that attend upon transformative political action: legislators and statesmen will confront

the limits of human foresight and control when they attempt to found or improve regimes

in lasting ways.

Yet Aristotle’s reflections on luck, responsibility, and politics leave many

questions unanswered. What would it mean, more concretely, for a political leader to be

both serious and prudent in the face of ostensible misfortune? How does the political

leader acquire the virtues necessary to withstand apparent bad luck in the first place?

Could it be the case that the realization of these virtues is a matter of luck? One may also

wonder whether the political leader can or should attempt to imprint his virtue onto the

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regime: would such an education take, assuming that the people are more likely to reify

luck, if not to associate it with the divine? In the next chapter, I turn to the profound and

provocative treatment of these questions found in the political thought of Machiavelli.

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CHAPTER 3: LUCK AND CHARACTER

IN MACHIAVELLI’S POLITICAL THOUGHT

I have argued the case for the presence of a skeptical and deflationary approach to luck in

the political thought of Aristotle. By contrast, the presence of such an approach in

Machiavelli’s thought is well-known. Although his predecessors and contemporaries had

extensively considered questions of luck, virtue, and character, Victoria Kahn has shown

that Machiavelli put to his own purposes the Quattrocento humanist treatment of fortune

and virtue.1 Whereas the humanists had extolled the Ciceronian and Christian virtues as

remedies for both good and bad fortune, Machiavelli denied that the world was ordered

either by a hierarchy of natural ends or by the providential will of the Christian God.2 By

abstracting God from politics, and by presenting human nature as oriented toward the

acquisition of external goods such as power and glory, Machiavelli was led to redefine

1 See Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 18-24, 32, 38. Kahn’s is the most

comprehensive and persuasive account of Machiavelli’s critique of the Renaissance

humanists. See also Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 3-30; and Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman,

esp. 18-19, 143-44, 153. Even Gilbert acknowledges that none of Machiavelli’s

contemporaries explored so doggedly and precisely the relation of virtue to fortune; see

his Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners, 206. For an interpretation that more or less

reconciles Machiavelli to his civic-humanist milieu, see Skinner, The Foundations of

Modern Political Thought.

2 On this point, see Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” 37; Wolin, Politics and

Vision, 2nd ed., 201.

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virtue as efficacious power.3 This redefinition in itself illustrates how profoundly

Machiavelli had already departed from Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and mediaeval

Christian paradigms, according to which virtue was intrinsically noble and choiceworthy,

even if it did not always constitute a bulwark against the ravages of fortune.4

But how far, in Machiavelli’s view, did the efficacious power of virtù extend—

even to the character of the virtuoso himself? A number of scholarly authorities insist that

Machiavelli ascribes to the man of virtue the capacity to shape both his own nature and

those of his fellows freely and at will.5 In fact, though, Machiavelli’s thought on the

dynamic relation between virtue and fortune is shot-through with a surprising number of

apparent inconsistencies, compromises, and ambiguities. On the one hand, Machiavelli

reveals and recommends technologies of political power that promise to deliver to

virtuous princes and republics the goods of fortune that they desire. On the other hand,

Machiavelli also attends to the fateful and often controlling presence of fortuna in our

political lives, and even in the constitution of the character of the virtuous prince. This

chapters aims to do justice to both the optimistic and the pessimistic sides of

3 See Fischer, “Machiavelli’s Rapacious Republicanism,” xxxv.

4 See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 234-69; and Newell, “How Original Is

Machiavelli?,” 617-38.

5 See, for example, Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 167; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s

Virtue, 36-38; McIntosh, “The Modernity of Machiavelli,” 190; Newell, Tyranny, 303-34;

Strauss, Thoughts Machiavelli, 252-53, 297-98.

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Machiavelli’s thought on the topic of fortune, though it focuses on the latter, which has

received short-shrift in the critical literature.6

In particular, I argue that the character of the virtuous Machiavellian prince arises

out of a complex and contingent series of events and experiences that Machiavelli

himself associates with the idea of fortune. This argument challenges head-on the view of

the Machiavellian prince as a wholly self-made man. Equally important, whereas notable

republican and democratic interpreters of Machiavelli suggest that Machiavelli’s Rome

succeeded, to the greatest extent possible, in overcoming “time and change” and in

making an “escape from fortuna,” I show that the civic education identified by

Machiavelli as a chief source of Rome’s resiliency was likewise influenced by fortune.7

To be sure, these are deep and paradoxical incongruities and tensions in Machiavelli’s

political thought. But perhaps the fractures belong to political reality itself rather than to

6 Multiple commentators have called Machiavelli’s political vision comic. See Lord, “On

Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” 807; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 285, 292. Of course,

Machiavelli wrote comedies, not tragedies. Machiavelli did, however, sign his letters:

“Niccolò Machiavelli, istorico, comico e tragico.” See Wolin, Politics and Vision, 187;

Plato, Symposium 223d.

7 These phrases are drawn from Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 190. McCormick has

modified Pocock’s republican reading of Machiavelli to accommodate egalitarianism and

democracy. See McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy; and more importantly, for the

purposes of this chapter, McCormick, “Addressing the Political Exception,” 888-900. Cf.

Zuckert, “Machiavelli’s Democratic Republic” 262-94.

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Machiavelli alone. Either way, examining questions of human agency and contingency in

the company of the Florentine will shed light both on the questions themselves and on his

political vision.

I begin by revisiting the problematic relation of virtue to fortune in The Prince. If

there is anything novel to say about this well-worn theme, it is that the prince of virtù is

vulnerable, both extrinsically and intrinsically, to fortuna. For Machiavelli, the prince’s

inability fully to control his character gives rise to a grave political problem—the

problem of succession. Machiavelli’s analysis of this problem leads us to his other

masterwork, the Discourses on Livy. In the Discorsi, Machiavelli seems to say that the

republic is superior to the principality because the republic contains a deep pool of

potential leaders, whose diverse natures may be matched to the diverse external

contingencies faced by the republic over time. What he shows us, however, is that the

republic, no less than the prince, is vulnerable to luck. Yet Machiavelli’s hardheaded

acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of contingency does not issue in tragic

resignation. The depiction in the Discourses of the Roman re-founder Marcus Furius

Camillus suggests that a leader who learns in adversity the necessity of prudent self-

reliance can teach the republic to imitate his virtue.

However, two questions remain. First, where and how does the republican re-

founder arise in the first place? Is his arrival a matter of luck, similar to the appearance of

a god among mortals? Second, Machiavelli seems to argue that the re-founder ought to

follow Camillus, who cultivates a quasi-Stoical indifference to fortune in order to acquire

precisely those goods of fortune—in particular, power and glory—that the Stoics

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disdained. The conclusion of the chapter will consider the significance of this paradox,

which modern political thought inherits from Machiavelli.

Luck and Character in The Prince

The question of the individual’s vulnerability to luck lies at the heart of the controversy

surrounding Machiavelli’s legacy. Many interpreters argue that Machiavelli’s legacy

extends beyond republican political thought and practice to the birth of Enlightenment

science and modern technology. “Hidden in Machiavelli’s writings,” writes Roger D.

Masters, “is the proposal that humans use natural science and technical expertise to

imitate the creative power of the Judeo-Christian God.”8 According to Waller Newell,

Machiavelli’s proposal for the conquest of nature can be seen in the virtue he ascribes to

his greatest princes. Newell defines virtue as a “godlike power for the transformation of

human nature and the natural environment.”9 In addition, Newell writes that the virtue of

Machiavelli’s new prince makes possible “an expression of power so perfect that it

ranges far beyond mere personal triumph to the imposition of epoch making new modes

and orders.”10 On Newell’s interpretation, then, the prince is invulnerable to luck, since

his virtue masters even nature and history.

In my view, Newell’s definition of virtue as unimpeded mastery exaggerates the

effectiveness of virtue while diminishing its usefulness as a guide to action. For if virtue

8 Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power, 209.

9 Newell, Tyranny, 303.

10 Ibid., 334.

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describes the successful overcoming of whatever conditions stand in the way of the

prince’s striving, then virtue always carries success in its train, while success always

betokens virtue. As Kahn has noted, Machiavelli himself ascribes this view of virtue not

to the prudent prince, but rather to the ignorant many.11 In Machiavelli’s own words: “For

the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world

there is no one but the vulgar” (P 18).12 To suppose, with the people, that every good

outcome reflects efficacious human agency is to forget that success sometimes occurs as

a consequence of dumb luck. But Machiavelli is at pains to define, precisely, the relation

of virtue to luck.

More importantly, Machiavelli’s examples reveal the vulnerability of the prince to

contingencies of circumstance. The nineteenth chapter of the first book of the Discourses

supports this point: “[the prince] who is like Numa will hold [the state] or not hold it as

the times or fortune turn under him, but he who is like Romulus, and like him comes

armed with prudence and with arms, will hold it in every mode unless it is taken from

him by an obstinate and excessive force” (D 1.19.4). Even Romulus, whom Machiavelli

counts among the four greatest princes, might have been deprived of his state “by an

11 Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 38-9. See also Garver, “Machiavelli’s Prince: A

Neglected Rhetorical Classic,” 101.

12 I cite The Prince and the Discourses on Livy according to the standard fashion (by

work, book, chapter, and paragraph), and I inlay references in the text. I follow the

Mansfield translation of The Prince and the Mansfield-Tarcov translation of the

Discourses.

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obstinate and excessive force” (cf. P 6). Consider, too, the nineteenth chapter of The

Prince, in which Machiavelli discusses the death of the Roman emperor Caracalla at the

hands of a mere centurion: “Here it is to be noted that deaths such as these, which follow

from the decision of an obstinate spirit, cannot be avoided by princes because anyone

who does not care about death can hurt him; but the prince may well fear them less

because they are very rare” (P 6). Whether an individual is a Romulus or a Caracalla, an

“armed prophet” or an inept hereditary prince, his life may be ruined by an accident that

could not have been predicted or prevented.13

External contingencies form an indelible feature of “the Machiavellian cosmos”:14

“In all human things he who examines well sees this: that one inconvenience can never

be suppressed without another’s cropping up” (D 1.6.3; see also 1.37.1, 3.37.1; P 21).15 It

13 See also D 3.6.19: even though Machiavelli observes that conspiracies led by

republican generals are the most likely to succeed, he still maintains that these

conspiracies “have had various outcomes according to fortune” (D 3.6.19).

14 The reference is to the title of Anthony Parel’s book.

15 Machiavelli’s works are rife with similar statements about the instability of fortuna.

For example, see D 3.37.1: “It appears that in the actions of men, as we have discoursed

of another time, besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing to its perfection,

one finds close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good so easily

that appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other. One sees

this in all the things that men work on. So the good is acquired only with difficulty unless

you are aided by fortune, so that with its force it conquers this ordinary and natural

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is not surprising, therefore, that Machiavelli’s conception of virtue is suited to a world in

which external contingencies are pervasive. For Machiavelli, contingencies of

circumstance occasion the exercise of virtue. Hannah Arendt explains: “Virtù is the

response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather to the constellation of fortuna in

which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to him, to his virtù. There is no virtù

without fortuna and no fortuna without virtù.”16

Whether virtù itself may be shaped by fortuna is, however, a problem that has not

been explored in depth. The few commentators who have discussed the prince’s internal

vulnerability to luck—among them Eugene Garver and Gennaro Sasso—do not recognize

that Machiavelli himself offers a careful and extended treatment of the problem.17 In the

inconvenience.” See also D 1.37.1; P 21; McCormick, “Addressing the Political

Exception,” 888-900; Wootton, “From Fortune to Feedback,” 25; Lukes, “Fortune Comes

of Age,” 34-35. As Lukes makes clear, acknowledging the importance of contingencies

of circumstance in Machiavelli’s thought does not mean positing fortune as something

“out there” in the world.

16 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 137.

17 For example, Garver thinks that the “destructive achievement of chapter 25”—i.e.,

“Machiavelli’s necessary but incoherent demand that one choose a character”—renders

Machiavelli’s treatment of luck and character in The Prince ultimately incoherent. See

Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 117-121. Similarly, Sasso, in an

important passage that has been translated by McCanles, writes that fortune describes

“human nature itself . . . that dark and non virtuosa zone of character, which every man,

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first paragraph of “The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca,” for example, Machiavelli

notes that most virtuous individuals have been afflicted by serious misfortune: “Those

who consider it, my dearest Zanobi and Luigi, think it wonderful that all, or the larger

part, of those who have done very great things, and who have been excellent among the

men of their era, have in their birth and origin been humble and obscure, or at least have

been beyond all measure afflicted by Fortune.”18 Possibly, at least, it is merely

coincidental that the exemplary political figures to whom Machiavelli refers in this

passage have experienced prior misfortune on a significant scale.

Yet the sixth chapter of The Prince suggests a closer causal relationship and

thereby transforms this connection into a paradox. Somehow the extraordinary political

actor must experience bad luck in order to become virtuous. Could it be that bad luck is

actually good luck insofar as bad luck occasions the development of a naturally talented

character in the direction of virtue? To be sure, Machiavelli defines virtue in this chapter

as self-reliance in contradistinction to deference to fortune: “he who has relied less on

fortune has maintained himself more” (P 6). Machiavelli also insists that his four

exemplary princes—Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus, not to mention the “lesser

example” of Hiero of Syracuse—did not have “anything else from fortune than the

opportunity, which gave them the matter enabling them to introduce any form they

even the most prudent and virtuoso, contains necessarily within himself.” Cf. Sasso,

Niccolò Machiavelli, 395-96; McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe, 131-32.

18 Trans. Gilbert. Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 533. Strauss confirms that fortune is

a leitmotif of this work. See Thoughts on Machiavelli, 223-25.

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pleased” (P 6). Newell thinks that this line by itself shows that Machiavelli invests

princely virtue with “godlike” creative power.19 However, in the very next line,

Machiavelli says that “without that opportunity their virtue of spirit would have been

eliminated” (P 6). The existence of princely virtue is altogether contingent upon the

presence of certain “opportunities.”

Yet when Machiavelli goes on to elaborate these opportunities, they do not sound

like opportunities in the usual sense at all. Each of the princes named by Machiavelli—

Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, Theseus, and Hiero—was exposed or cast out as a child; so too

was Castruccio.20 In addition, before founding their states, each prince was stateless and

oppressed, if not outright enslaved as in the case of Moses (P 26). Their earliest

experiences of the world, then, were marked by serious misfortune, illustrating the point

that Machiavelli himself had made in the first line of the “Castruccio.” After recounting

their various travails, Machiavelli concludes: “Such opportunities, therefore, made these

men happy, and their excellent virtue enabled the opportunity to be recognized; hence

their fatherlands were ennobled by it and became very happy” (P 6).

How exactly did the experience of bad luck contribute to the virtue and the

accomplishments of Machiavelli’s armed prophets? The sixth chapter of The Prince

raises this question without answering it. Even so, Machiavelli’s choice of examples

places the emphasis on the experience of serious misfortune early in life, almost

19 Newell, Tyranny, 301.

20 Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 533-35. Anachronistically, one might say that these

princes were born into the Hobbesian state of nature, radically alone at risk.

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beginning with the moment of birth. The experience of bad luck somehow contributes to

the character-formation of individuals who do not rely on luck.21 Bad luck may be good

luck insofar as bad luck constitutes an opportunity for the prince to learn something

important about himself. In light of the type of virtue realized by the armed prophets, it

seems that, for Machiavelli, misfortune brings home to the capable individual the

importance of self-reliance. In this way Machiavelli may offer his own take on the

proverbial Greek idea of pathei mathos, “learning through suffering.”22

Machiavelli’s thematic treatment of fortune in the twenty-fifth chapter of The

Prince clarifies his argument in the sixth. Note, first of all, that Machiavelli begins and

ends this chapter by attacking the idea that fortune is itself an independent force—that

contingency exercises agency. Whereas Augustine and Boethius trace changes in the

fortunes of human beings to the educative aspect of divine providence; whereas medieval

cosmologists trace such changes to the motions of the stars, Machiavelli casts fortune as a

river and a woman, against which men may contend.23 But in the chapter’s central

21 Thus Erica Benner’s recent interpretation—according to which virtù and fortuna are

mutually exclusive symbols of approbation and reprobation, respectively—seems too

simple. See her “Machiavelli’s Amoral Fortuna,” 481-99.

22 For example, see Aeschylus, Agamemnon 177, 250.

23 Note that many commentators suppose—mistakenly, in my view—that Machiavelli did

see fortune as an independent force, if not as a goddess. See Parel, Machiavellian

Cosmos, 17-18, 28-29, 77; Parel, “Farewell to Fortune,” 587-604; Nederman, “Amazing

Grace: Fortune, God, and Free Will,” 617-38; Viroli, Machiavelli, 21-24. But

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section, Machiavelli “descends to particulars,” again affirming that the character of the

virtuous prince is vulnerable to luck (P 25). In the sixth chapter, Machiavelli had

dramatized the paradoxical power of bad luck to plant the seed of virtue in the characters

of the greatest princes; in the twenty-fifth, Machiavelli shows that the human character is,

in general, rocky soil for the cultivation of virtue. His careful analysis of the inability of

most human beings to become virtuous may help us to see why even the “armed

prophets” needed to experience bad luck in order to realize their virtue.

Prudence is the keynote of Machiavelli’s analysis of luck and character in this

chapter. For Machiavelli, prudence refers to the capacity of the individual to adjust his

ways of acting and ruling to fit shifting circumstances.24 Luck inevitably obtrudes on

imprudent action because imprudent action proceeds without regard for contingency or

circumstance. But even prudent action is vulnerable to luck, inasmuch as it is a matter of

luck whether a man becomes prudent and therewith virtuous. Thus Eugene Garver writes:

“chapter 25 of The Prince precisely seems to make the ability to withstand incident luck

into a matter of constitutive luck.”25 Yet, Garver sees this turn in the argument as the self-

Machiavelli explodes the view of fortune as an external power; see my analysis of the

river image in Chapter 1 above.

24 Machiavellian prudence departs from its Aristotelian and Ciceronian ancestors, since it

is not yoked to ethical virtues such as justice or honestas. See Garver, Machiavelli and

the History of Prudence, 54; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 32; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s

Virtue, 13, 38-45, 309-10.

25 Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 111.

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destruction of Machiavelli’s conception of princely agency, while I see it as the

culmination, in The Prince, of Machiavelli’s careful yet paradoxical reflections on the

topic of responsibility for character. Here Machiavelli burrows into the psyche of the

prince in order to explain his internal vulnerability to luck:

On this also depends the variability of the good: for if one governs himself

with caution and patience, and the times and affairs turn in such a way that

his government is good, he comes out happy; but if the times and affairs

change, he is ruined because he does not change his mode of proceeding.

Nor may a man be found so prudent as to know how to accommodate

himself to this, whether because he cannot deviate from what nature

inclines him to or also because, when one has always flourished by

walking on one path, he cannot be persuaded to depart from it. And so the

cautious man, when it is time to come to impetuosity, does not know how

to do it, hence comes to ruin; for if he would change his nature with the

times and with affairs, his fortune would not change. (P 25)

The most important obstacle to prudence is the tendency of the individual to

cleave out of habit to a certain mode of acting or ruling. “When one has flourished by

walking on one path, he cannot be persuaded to depart from it”; evidently, the prince

often believes that he himself is responsible for his success, that his success is not

contingent but natural and deserved (cf. P 2; D 3.8.2, 3.31.1). The belief that what

worked in the past will work well in the future corrupts prudence, and for this reason

likely issues in failure. Not only is bad luck actually good luck, but the obverse is also

true: good luck is bad luck because good luck seduces the prince into thinking that he is

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invulnerable. It is no accident that many princes who achieved success early in their

careers—for example, Cesare Borgia and Piero Soderini—are presented by Machiavelli

as failures in the end (P 7; D 3.3).

This explanation of the badness of good luck also illuminates, more brightly than

the sixth chapter, the goodness of bad luck. What does the prince learn through his

suffering? He learns that the human being is, as such, vulnerable to contingencies of

circumstance. Aware of his own vulnerability to contingencies of circumstance, and

hence of his need for prudence, the prince can resist both becoming “intoxicated” in good

fortune and “abject” in bad (D 3.31.1-3). Self-knowledge is the hoped-for-outcome of

bad luck.26 Otherwise, why was it necessary for Moses to find himself and his people

enslaved in Egypt, for Romulus to find himself stateless and bestialized? To be sure, bad

luck provided the armed prophets with a dark background against which their virtue

could shine. But the Machiavellian picture of politics suggests that such a background is

almost always available. Moreover, in the twentieth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli

argues that a prince can “astutely nourish some enmity so that when he has crushed it, his

greatness emerges the more from it” (P 20). What a prince cannot nourish absent

26 Observe the key line in Castruccio’s deathbed speech: “It is in this world of great

importance to know oneself, and to be able to measure the forces of one’s spirit and of

one’s position.” Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 554. It may be no coincidence that

this speech mentions fortune more often (i.e., five times) than any other speech in

Machiavelli’s writings—so far as I know.

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adversity is the “spirit in great things” that enables him to act in accordance with

prudence even as the blows of fortune fall upon him (D 3.6.15).

To become, through bad luck, the kind of human being who is able to adjust to

changes in luck, precisely because he knows himself to be vulnerable to luck, is to owe a

great debt to luck indeed. But to say this much is still to understate the extent to which

the prince’s character is shaped by luck, because, as the above passage makes clear, the

prince must also have the right nature. Machiavelli concludes that passage as follows: “if

he would change his nature with the times and with affairs, his fortune would not change”

(P 25). What Machiavelli means to indicate, in my view, is that the prospect of perfect

flexibility is a tantalizing impossibility. Scattered throughout Machiavelli’s writings are

similar statements on the inability of men to change their natures. Consider Discourse

3.9: “Two things are causes why we are unable to change: one, that we are unable to

oppose that to which nature inclines us; the other, that when one individual has prospered

very much with one mode of proceeding, it is not possible to persuade him that he can do

well to proceed otherwise” (D 3.9.3). A discussion of these themes in the letter known as

the Ghiribizzi sounds the same note: “[men] cannot command their natures.”27

Emphatically and repeatedly, Machiavelli declares that the nature of the prince is

inflexible.28

Scholars who follow Leo Strauss—such as Newell, with whom I began this

section—would probably disagree with the foregoing reading. For these interpreters,

27 Trans. Gilbert. Machiavelli, “Letter No. 116,” 897.

28 On this point, and the Ghiribizzi, see also Nederman, “Amazing Grace,” 623-24.

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Machiavelli depicts the prince as a shape-shifter, who tames and channels his passions in

order to master fortune. Certainly Harvey Mansfield aims to follow Strauss when he

locates “the origin of what is called the ‘reductionism’ of modernity” in the persona of

Machiavelli’s protean prince.29 For Mansfield, the prince’s flexibility comprises the sum

and substance of his humanity: “while beasts are confined to their single natures, man is

the all-around beast who because of his rationality is free to take on the nature of any

convenient beast.”30

The problem with this emphasis on flexibility is that it does not square with

Machiavelli’s examples. While Machiavelli’s princes manifest flexible judgment, their

natures seem inflexible. Mansfield concedes the point: “Virtue, we have seen, must be

flexible. . . . But the main truth is that individuals have inflexible natures that define their

virtues and limit them to flourishing in times in which those virtues are appropriate.”31

What else could one conclude from the example of Pope Julius II in The Prince, chapter

25? Although Machiavelli marvels at Julius’s caginess, he also affirms that Julius was

impetuous by nature; and it was by chance that the times favored an impetuous, warlike

pope.32 “If times had come when he had needed to proceed with caution, his ruin would

have followed: he would never have deviated from those modes to which nature inclined

him” (P 25). In fact, inflexibility marks almost every ancient prince or “prince of the

29 Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 37.

30 Ibid., 38.

31 Ibid., 41-42.

32 Ronald Beiner notes Julius’s guile in Civil Religion, 24-26. Cf. D 3.44.

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republic” whom Machiavelli praises.33 Hannibal was cruel; Titus Manlius Torquatus,

severe; Fabius Maximus, prudent and cautious; Scipio Africanus, agreeable; Valerius

Corvinus, gentle; Romulus, warlike; and Numa, pacific.34

True, Machiavelli exhorts the prince to manage his reputation theatrically. In

Newell’s view, for example, Machiavelli “tells the prince that there is nothing more

useful for him than to cultivate the appearance of possessing the traditional virtues as a

reputational smokescreen.”35 Indeed, beginning with Guicciardini, readers of Machiavelli

have often noted the importance of “theatricality” to Machiavellian virtue.36 It is

important, though, that we do not conflate the reputation for virtue with virtue itself—the

very mistake that Machiavelli associates with the classical and Christian discourses on

the virtues. The point of Machiavelli’s trans-valuation of the virtues in Chapters 15

through 19 of The Prince is to substitute virtues that are effective “in deed” for

33 The phrase, “prince of the republic,” occurs in Discourse 1.33.3.

34 Machiavelli treats the inflexible nature of Hannibal in The Prince ch. 18 and Discourse

3.21; that of Torquatus, in Discourse 3.22; Fabius, in Discourse 3.9; Scipio, in The

Prince ch. 14 and 17 and Discourse 3.21; Valerius, in Discourse 3.22; Romulus, in The

Prince ch. 6 and Discourse 1.19; and Numa, likewise in Discourse 1.19. In these lines I

echo the formulation of Strauss while challenging his conclusion. See Thoughts on

Machiavelli, 244 ff.

35 Newell, Tyranny, 329.

36 For example, Guicciardini, “Considerations,” 412; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 15,

33-35; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 16-19, 25.

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philosophic and otherworldly virtues, which aid the prince only “in speech” (P 15).37 For

example, Machiavelli says, in Chapter 17, that “Cesare Borgia was held to be cruel;

nonetheless, his cruelty restored the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and

faith” (P 17). Therefore a prince “should not care about the infamy of cruelty,” because

37 See also Discourse 2.15, in which Machiavelli quotes, from Livy, the words of the

Latin praetor Annius: “‘I judge it to belong to the highest of our affairs for you to

consider more what we ought to do than what is to be said. Once the counsels are made

clear, it will be easy to accommodate words to things.’ Without doubt these words are

very true and should be relished by every prince and by every republic” (D 2.15.1; cf.

Livy 8.4). Later in the Discourses, Machiavelli recommends a similar speech by the

Roman consul Valerius Corvinus: “‘Soldiers, I want you to follow my deeds, not my

words; to seek from me not only discipline but also example, who have won for myself

with this right hand three consulates and the highest praise.’ These words, considered

well, teach anyone whatever how he ought to proceed if he wishes to hold the rank of

captain; and one who has done otherwise will find in time that whether he was led to the

rank by fortune or by ambition, it will be taken from him and will not give him

reputation, for titles do not give luster to men, but men to titles” (D 3.31.1; cf. Livy 7.32).

In sum, deeds are more efficacious than words—though a stirring speech about the

efficaciousness of deeds is also efficacious, apparently. It would be useful and interesting

to compare the dynamic opposition between words and deeds in Machiavelli’s thought to

the similar opposition found in Thucydides’ thought. See Chapter 4 on the logos-ergon

opposition in Thucydides.

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cruelty, as practiced by Cesare and Hannibal, works as a mode of rule (P 17). In the

eighteenth chapter, Machiavelli again redirects the gaze of the prince away from speeches

and toward deeds. His striking suggestion is that the tendency of the people to be “taken

in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing” actually relieves the prince of the need

to pander to the people: “So let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always

be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone” (P 18; see also P 3; D 3.3). At the

same time, and for the same reason, it is easy for the prince to win over the people by

giving outward signs of generosity and religiosity. Because “everyone sees how you

appear, [yet] few touch what you are,” the prince can focus his attention on the effective

application of power, while appeasing the people from time to time (P 18). Thus

Machiavelli concludes this line of argument: a prince who knows “how to avoid those

things that make him hateful and contemptible . . . will have done his part and will find

no danger in his other infamies” (P 19; see also D 1.27.2).

Not only does Machiavelli assert, then, that nature dispenses inflexible characters

to princes by chance, but he also warns against the pursuit of perfect flexibility as a mode

of rule: “Above all, a prince should live with his subjects so that no single accident

whether good or bad has to make him change” (P 8). Because the prince cannot change

his nature, he should not attempt to walk a “middle way” between qualities, but should

instead “always [proceed] as nature forces [him]” (D 3.9.1, 3.21.3).38 To do otherwise is

38 Against this argument, someone cite The Prince, ch. 18: “And so [the prince] needs to

have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variation of things command

him. . . .” Without a doubt, there is a tension in Machiavelli’s thought on this point—

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to repeat the mistake of the Roman Decemvir Appius Claudius, who deceived himself

when he tried to ascend from humble friendship with the Roman people to proud rule

over them (D 1.40-41, 2.14). Flexible judgment, not flexibility of character, is the key to

success for Machiavelli. Thus we can make sense of his parody of the Ciceronian parable

in The Prince, Chapter 18: “the one who has known best how to use the fox has come out

best” because foxy cunning, steeled by experience in wielding leonine force, is usually

successful (P 18).39 As we have seen, prudence requires, for its development, the

coincidence of a talented nature—a “first brain” (P 22)—with bad luck sufficient to spur

the would-be prince to develop his virtue. The prince of virtue is, therefore, vulnerable to

luck—both inside and out.

though I think that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Machiavelli advises

the prince to exercise flexible judgment, not to try to change his nature altogether. When

Machiavelli says in this line that the prince should have a spirit (animo) disposed to

change like the wind, he may mean that the prince should be sufficiently bold and

irreverent to take advantage of every contingency of circumstance. On animo, see Clarke,

“On the Woman Question in Machiavelli,” 237-41; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 40.

See also Mansfield’s note on animo in The Prince, 4 n. 5: “animo refers to the ‘spirit’

with which human beings defend themselves. . . .”

39 I do not intend to follow Lukes in “Lionizing Machiavelli,” 561-75. Prudence is

powerless absent boldness, while boldness needs prudence in order to rise above

recklessness.

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That the prince is not responsible for his own character gives rise to a political

problem that lies at the heart of Machiavelli’s thought. What will happen to the prince’s

state when he dies? Machiavelli doubts that the virtuous prince can communicate his

virtue to his son. Septimius Severus, a man whom Machiavelli calls “a new prince” and

“a very fierce lion and a very astute fox,” fathered Caracalla, who succeeded him as

emperor (P 19). Although Caracalla’s nature resembled that of his father, Machiavelli

suggests that Caracalla did not experience the type of bad luck that might have taught

him his father’s foxiness. Conversely, the gentle and philosophic Marcus Aurelius

generated a son, Commodus, whose brutal and obtuse nature overwhelmed his education

(P 19; see also D 3.6.10). Machiavelli’s treatment of the problem of succession in the

nineteenth chapter suggests that the prince should adopt his son; elsewhere Machiavelli

makes explicit his preference for adoption (D 1.10). Be that as it may, The Prince

exhibits the general failure of princes—even “adopted princes,” such as Marcus

Aurelius—to select worthy heirs. Just as the prince cannot fully control his own

character, so too he fails to control the character of his successor. It is for this reason that

Machiavelli is, ultimately, a critic of the principality as a regime-type. He prefers to the

principality the regime that aims to generate “infinite most virtuous princes,” namely, the

republic (D 1.20).

The Problem of Fortune Solved? Machiavelli’s Discourses

In Discourse 3.9, Machiavelli offers a programmatic statement on the superiority of the

republic to the principality. This discourse is linked to The Prince, Chapter 25, by its title,

argument, and examples. As in The Prince, Machiavelli argues that a man would enjoy

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continuous good fortune if he could change his nature to fit every circumstance; the fact

of the matter, however, is that he cannot so change himself. So too Julius II appears,

again, as an example of inflexibility. However, Discourse 3.9 goes on to address the key

political question that is left unaddressed in The Prince—the question of succession. In

particular, Machiavelli recounts the succession in Roman leadership from Fabius

Maximus Cunctator to Scipio Africanus:

But [Scipio] was born in a republic where there were diverse citizens and

diverse humors; as it had Fabius, who was the best in times proper for

sustaining war, so later it had Scipio in times apt for winning it.

Hence it arises that a republic has greater life and good fortune

longer than a principality, for it can accommodate itself better than one

prince can to the diversity of times through the diversity of the citizens

that are in it. For a man who is accustomed to proceed in one mode never

changes, as was said; and it must be of necessity that when the times

change not in conformity with his mode, he is ruined. (D 3.9.1-2)

Machiavelli suggests that republican adaptability arises, in the first place, from the

diversity of human types contained within the republic’s pool of citizens. Moreover, the

republic somehow manages to call upon the right leader at the right time. In a time that

called for caution, Fabius Maximus Cunctator (hesitator) led the Roman army against

Hannibal; but the young and fiery Scipio Africanus assumed the command when the

opportunity arose to defeat Hannibal once and for all. The question is how the republic

transitions from one leader, or set of leaders, to another in accordance with changes in

circumstance. One may also wonder how the republic generates so many potential

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leaders. While Machiavelli insists, in Discourse 3.9, on the adaptability of the republic in

responding to accidents, he does not explain how this works.

Civic-humanist and democratic interpreters of Machiavelli seize on Discourse 3.9

because these interpreters think that they can readily explain the phenomenon of

republican succession and hence of republican adaptability. In short, the republic as a

whole prudently chooses its leaders, employing democratic mechanisms of deliberation

and election. Citing Discourse 3.9, J.G.A. Pocock writes: “the few and the many together

know how to choose . . . the right man at the right moment.”40 John McCormick also

emphasizes “the will of [the] political body” of Roman citizens in “responding to

accidents.”41 For McCormick, the socioeconomic and institutional mixing of the few and

the many rendered the Roman republic “more conducive and specifically adaptive to

political reality.”42 Similarly, Garver goes so far as to call Machiavelli’s Rome “a

community of Machiavellian princes,” in which “prudence and virtù are employed by an

entire community.”43

It does not make sense, however, to consider the Machiavellian republic “a

community of princes” unless the people in fact elects its “princes” and holds them

accountable. Ryan Balot and Stephen Trochimchuk have recently argued against the

40 Pocock, “Machiavelli and Rome,” 152-53.

41 McCormick, “Addressing the Political Exception,” 889.

42 Ibid., 895.

43 Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 123.

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democratic view of Machiavelli’s Rome.44 They show that the people, on Machiavelli’s

presentation, does not participate in deliberation and self-government; rather, the demos

is ruled, either directly or indirectly (for example, through religion), by the nobility. For

my purposes in this section of the chapter, in which I aim to clarify the puzzle of the

republic’s “greater life and good fortune,” asserted by Machiavelli in Discourse 3.9, it

suffices to say that the civic-humanist and democratic interpreters of Machiavelli seem to

miss the mark, because the actions of Machiavelli’s plebs are neither self-guided nor

prudent. Whereas the prince is inflexible, the people is all too flexible.

The flexibility of the people is a point that scholars have not recognized, though it

is one that Machiavelli himself accentuates across his works. Machiavelli’s Roman

citizenry does not manifest “political, moral, and economic autonomy,” in the words of

Pocock.45 On the contrary, what defines the many, in contradistinction to the few, is

flexibility, that is, the susceptibility of the many either to be educated or corrupted at the

hands of the few. In Machiavelli’s own words: “The nature of peoples is variable; and it

is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion” (P

6). Machiavelli ascribes to the prince tremendous power to reshape the character of the

people: “It is more true than any other truth that if where there are men there are no

soldiers, it arises through a defect of the prince and not through any other defect, either of

44 Balot and Trochimchuk, “The Many and the Few,” 559-588.

45 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 212.

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the site or of nature (D 1.21.1).46 Furthermore, Machiavelli does not wholly exempt

republican peoples from his characterization of the demos as flexible, though he does

recognize that republican peoples display fierce patriotism (P 5; D 1.58, 3.8.1). Even the

Roman people reacted, hysterically, to changes in circumstance—by turns hoping for the

unattainable best and fearing the unlikely worst (D 1.44, 1.53, 2.29). Machiavelli joins a

long line of political thinkers, stretching back to classical antiquity, who worry that the

fickle emotions of the demos cloud its judgment.47 At the same time, Machiavelli sees in

the irrepressible fears and hopes of the people the possibility of successful demos-

management. Extraordinary leaders can use emotional alchemy, as it were, to order the

people, especially during war (D 3.14, 3.33).

That the flexible Roman people are themselves shaped and directed by inflexible

princes of the republic raises, with greater urgency, the question of how the republic

manages to solve the problem of succession by matching leaders of diverse natures to the

diverse accidents faced by the republic over time. What accounts for the “greater life and

good fortune” of the republic? To be sure, “there was always a place for the virtue of

men” in Machiavelli’s Rome because the republic was “ordered for war” (D 3.16.2).

Moreover, the Romans “went to find virtue in whatever house it inhabited,” refusing to

46 The prince’s ability to shape the people is relevant in the republican context.

Machiavelli frequently refers to “princes of the republic” (e.g., Discourses, 1.12.1,

1.18.4, 1.20, 1.29.3, 1.33.3).

47 See, for example, Thucydides’ remarks at 2.65.4-9 and 4.108.4, among many other

passages treated in Chapter 4.

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discount leaders on the basis of age, wealth, or social status (D 1.60, 3.25.1). These

design features do not explain, however, why it was that Rome had a large number of

capable citizens in its pool of potential consuls, tribunes, dictators, and captains. Nor do

they explain the fundamental problem: how did one leader come to succeed another?

Could it be the case, then, that particular Roman leaders arose at particular times

as a matter of luck? Indeed, when we look more closely at the signal example put forth by

Machiavelli in Discourse 3.9, the transition in leadership from Fabius Maximus

Cunctator to Scipio Africanus, we see that a confluence both of contingent relations

between the classes and of contingent events on the battlefield precipitated Scipio’s

ascendancy and success. How did Scipio win the consulship and defeat Hannibal?

Machiavelli nowhere says that the plebs “elected” Scipio. He might seem to say, at the

conclusion of the seventeenth chapter of The Prince, that the Senate was responsible for

Scipio’s ascendancy to the consulship. However, Discourse 1.53 shows that the Senate

trusted “the judgment of Fabius Maximus” over and against that of Scipio (D 1.53.4).

Only when Scipio threatened to propose the enterprise to the people, knowing “that great

hopes and mighty promises easily move [the people],” did the Senate acquiesce in his

plan to venture to Africa.48 Evidently the Senate held out little hope that Scipio would

48 These words are drawn from the title of Discourse 1.53. Machiavelli suggests that the

Senate may have agreed to send Scipio against Hannibal for the same reason it previously

agreed to send Marcus Centenius Penula, “a very vile man”: “To the Senate [Penula’s]

request appeared rash; nonetheless, thinking that if it were denied to him and his asking

later became known among the people, there might arise from it some tumult, envy, and

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defeat Hannibal; but defeat him he did. Here the narrative becomes still more complex.

For Scipio’s success was also brought about by Hannibal’s imprudent hopefulness.

Hannibal pressed on after defeating the Romans at Cannae, whereas, in Machiavelli’s

judgment, “the intention of the Carthaginians should have been to show the Romans that

they were able enough to combat them, and, having had victory over them, one should

not seek to lose it through hope of a greater” (D 2.27.1). Thus the career of Scipio

Africanus, as Machiavelli depicts it, involves a complex interplay of human agency with

accidents domestic and foreign.

Throughout the Discourses, in fact, Machiavelli shows that “accidents” obtrude

on the political agency of the republic, and he explicitly associates accidenti with

fortuna.49 On the topic of Rome’s internal vulnerability to luck, consider that Machiavelli

disfavor toward the senatorial order, they conceded it to him, wishing rather to put in

danger all those who followed him. . .” ( D 1.53.3). Penula and his detachment never

returned. The implication is that the Senate was likewise willing to try its luck with

Scipio, believing that his defeat would at least rid the city of a menace. On senatorial

manipulation of Scipio, see the recent account of McCormick, “Machiavelli’s Inglorious

Tyrants,” 29-52.

49 For example, the near-conquest of Rome by the Gauls was both the work of “fortune”

and an “extrinsic accident” (D 2.29-30, 3.1). See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 223:

“We conclude that the fundamental thought which finds expression in both books

consists in a movement from God to Fortuna and then from Fortuna via accidents, and

accidents occurring to bodies or accidents of bodies, to chance understood as a non-

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declines to praise Rome for the gratitude shown by its citizens to exceptional individuals,

just as he declines to blame ancient-democratic Athens for its ingratitude. Machiavelli

instead emphasizes “the diversity of accidents that arose in these cities. For whoever

considers things subtly will see for himself that if freedom had been taken away in Rome

as in Athens, Rome would not have been more merciful toward its citizens than the latter

was” (D 1.28). Individual leaders of the republic inevitably alter its constitution and

history; the accidental rise of the Peisistratid tyranny accounted for the ingratitude of the

Athenians. Thus Machiavelli suggests that the Roman republic might have succumbed to

tyranny at the time of the Decemvirate if Appius Claudius had been shrewd (D 1.40.5).

Alternatively, if a man “expert in civil affairs,” such as the Florentine Niccolò da Uzzano,

had been alive during the time of Caesar, the republic might have been preserved (D

1.33.3). Of course, Machiavelli argues, in the opening discourses of the work, that the

teleological necessity which leaves room for choice and prudence and therefore for

chance as the cause of simply unforeseeable accidents.” Precisely because Machiavelli

does not see fortune as something “out there” in the world, he can use this idea in

multiple registers, including in reference to the unexpected outcomes of human action

itself. On the distinctiveness of Machiavelli’s language of accidents and its specific

differences from scholastic usages of the term, see McCormick, “Addressing the Political

Exception,” 888-89. On the possibility that Machiavelli was influenced by the Lucretian

usage of “accidents,” see Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things,” 455-58; and Rahe, “In

the Shadow of Lucretius,” 30-55.

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very institutional structure of the Roman republic arose out of a series of accidents that he

explicitly ascribes to chance: “what an orderer had not done, chance did” (D 1.2.7 ff.).50

Rome’s external vulnerability to accidents is no less fundamental to Machiavelli’s

analysis. As we have already noted, contingent events on the battlefield, such as Scipio’s

conquest of the Carthaginians at Zama, affected the composition of the Roman leadership

and relations between the classes. Machiavelli returns again and again to the near-defeat

of the Romans at the hands of the Gauls; this “extrinsic accident” could have resulted in

the end of Roman freedom (D 2.29-30, 3.1, 3.30). In the event, however, the invasion of

the Gauls was among those “strong and difficult accident[s], in which each, seeing

himself perishing, puts aside every ambition and runs voluntarily to obey him who he

believes can free him with his virtue” (D 3.30.1). Having escaped the Gauls, due to the

leadership of the general Marcus Furius Camillus above all, the Romans supported

Camillus in his project of re-founding the republic’s religious and judicial orders (D

3.1.2). Extrinsic accidents, mediated by the actions of leaders like Camillus, led to

alterations in Rome’s core institutions and practices. To give another example, a certain

50 In these passages Machiavelli uses the words “fortune,” “chance,” and “accidents”

interchangeably; in addition to the line quoted above, consider the following line, drawn

from the same passage: “For if the first fortune did not fall to Rome, the second fell to it;

for if its first orders were defective, nonetheless they did not deviate from the right way

that could lead them to perfection” (D 1.2.7). Cf. the title of the following Discourse:

“What Accidents made the Tribunes of the Plebs Be Created in Rome, Which Made the

Republic More Perfect” (D 1.3).

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“conspiracy” of the Latins and the Sabines, who sought to check Rome’s burgeoning

power, occasioned the advent of the dictatorship, a “remedy” that Machiavelli judges

“always most useful in all those accidents that arose at any time against the republic in

the increasing of the empire” (D 1.33.1).

Thus Machiavelli’s paradoxical identification of bad luck with good luck recurs

on the level of the republic. Not only did the mixed structure of the Roman government

arise out of contestations between the few and the many after the death of the Tarquin

kings, but Rome also achieved its military strength and glory-loving ethos not least

because “in every least part of the world the Romans found a conspiracy of republics

very armed and very obstinate in defense of their freedom”—that is, because neighboring

peoples attacked them from all sides, compelling the Romans to grow stronger (D 2.2.2).

The modes and orders of the Roman republic took shape under pressures exerted by

apparent misfortunes. It was by accident, so to speak, that the republic discovered modi

ed ordini capable of responding to accidents.

But this means that while “it is of necessity, as was said other times, that in a

great city accidents arise every day that have need of a physician,” the republic does not

always succeed in diagnosing the disease or in prescribing the appropriate remedy (D

3.49.1).51 Thus, in this final discourse of the work, Machiavelli offers the example of

Quintus Fabius Maximus, who restored the exclusivity of the Senate by reversing the

reforms of Appius Claudius Crassus—reforms that had allowed plebian Romans to be

51 Discourses, 3.49.1.

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elected senators.52 Rome had need of such a correction to its most fundamental

institutions “every day” in Machiavelli’s view (D 3.49.1). In this way Machiavelli

suggests that Rome’s basic orders were themselves radically contingent. I conclude, then,

that Pocock goes too far when he suggests that “escape from time and change” was the

goal of Rome; and that “this goal was achieved” by the republic.53 Machiavelli’s Rome

does not “escape from fortuna”; even at the height of its power, the republic was shaped

by its daily confrontation with fortuna.54

The Constancy of Machiavelli’s Marcus Furius Camillus

This chapter cuts against the grain of the critical literature inasmuch as I attempt to

clarify Machiavelli’s pessimistic reflections on political agency. But I do not conclude,

with Viroli, that Machiavelli’s “belief in Fortune . . . calls for resignation.”55 As we have

52 See Livy 9.46.

53 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 190. Cf. McCormick, “Addressing the Political

Exception,” 895.

54 Again, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 190.

55 To be fair to Viroli, I reproduce the full line: “[Machiavelli’s] belief in Fortune and

heaven call for resignation; his commitment to the pursuit of great things calls for

political action.” See his Machiavelli, 21. Yet, on Viroli’s reading, the pursuit of great

things is possible only to the extent that fortune permits it. Viroli argues that Machiavelli

deferred to fortuna when he resigned himself to life on the fringes of politics (173). For a

fundamentally similar view, see Martinez, “Tragic Machiavelli,” 102-9.

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seen, Machiavelli shows that the extraordinary political actor sometimes learns in

adversity the importance of prudence and steadfastness; these qualities of character

empower him to contend with fortune. What is more, Machiavelli suggests, in the third

book of the Discourses, that a republican re-founder should attempt to imprint his

virtuous character on the citizens of the republic.

More precisely, Machiavelli’s treatment of Marcus Furius Camillus, the great re-

founder of Rome, demonstrates how an extraordinary individual may convert his virtue

into “a mode of life” or an “education” that leads even the overly flexible people to

approach his firmness of spirit (D 3.31). The “greater life and good fortune” of the

republic had its origin in the Roman education, which Machiavelli traces to the mind of

Camillus—though he makes clear, at the same time, that Camillus was one among a

series of Roman re-founders (D 3.1, 3.49). Furthermore, Machiavelli’s depiction of the

career of Camillus suggests that the nature of the Roman nobility, no less than that of the

plebs, was susceptible to being shaped by a prince of the republic (D 3.31.3, 3.36, 3.46).56

How, then, does Camillus’ re-founding of Rome bear on the puzzle of Discourse

3.9? I have not yet explained how the republic 1) generated a deep pool of potential

leaders, while managing 2) to call upon the leader whose nature suited the time.

56 Perhaps the Roman education took hold of the nobility most of all. Machiavelli’s

Roman Senate often acted in accordance with the ethos of hardhearted detachment

inculcated by Camillus and the other re-founders (cf. D 1.11, 1.13, 1.33, 1.38, 1.48, 1.51,

1.54, 1.55, 1.57, 2.23, 2.33, 3.11, 3.22, 3.25, 3.28). But this topic lies beyond the scope of

the chapter.

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Machiavelli’s depiction of the republican re-founding wrought by Camillus goes some

way toward solving the first half of the puzzle. Camillus shaped the Roman character,

including the character of the nobility; in so doing, he might have hoped to generate

multiple potential successors. The second problem, however, will prove intractable.

Close attention to Machiavelli’s account of Marcus Furius Camillus is all but

absent from the critical literature.57 This is a peculiar lacuna, in light of the attention that

Machiavelli himself lavishes upon Camillus. Of all the “prudent princes” who ordered

Rome for a “free way of life” (D 3.1.1), Machiavelli devotes, in the Discourses, the most

ink and praise to Camillus, who was “the most prudent of all the Roman captains” (D

3.12.3) and a man “adored as a prince” (1.29.3). Not even Romulus receives similar

treatment. One possible reason for the discrepancy is that Machiavelli wants to explode

the distinction between the founder and re-founder: “And truly, if a prince seeks the glory

of the world, he ought to desire to possess a corrupt city—not to spoil it entirely as did

57 Those who mention Camillus do so in the context of treating what Strauss calls “the

Tacitean subsection,” i.e., Discourses 3.19-23. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 160-5;

Coby, Liberty and Greatness, 179-88; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders,

373-86; Sullivan, Machiavelli’s Three Romes, 148-54; Zuckert, “Machiavelli’s

Democratic Republic,” 288, 290. No entry for Camillus is found in the indices of many

books on Machiavelli’s republicanism—e.g., Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire;

and Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism.

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Caesar but to reorder it as did Romulus” (D 1.10.6). Since every founder is a re-founder,

Machiavelli attends to the paradigmatic re-founder, Camillus.58

More importantly, Machiavelli uses the re-founding of Rome by Camillus to

deepen his reflections on the relation of political agency to contingency. Fortune looms

large in the career of Camillus. Camillus is a prince who learned through bad luck—in his

case, exile—to cultivate indifference to luck, the better to adjust to luck. Prior to his

exile, Camillus was “altogether rash and hardly prudent” (D 3.23). Machiavelli tells us

that Camillus vacillated, wildly, in his rule as general. For example, Camillus confiscated

the booty gathered by his soldiers after the conquest of Veii on the grounds that he had

promised it to Apollo; yet, upon returning to Rome, he paraded through the city in the

guise of Jupiter, an act that betrayed Camillus’ impiety (D 1.55.1, 3.23).59 It was only in

58 Anticipating Nietzsche and Foucault, Machiavelli argues that there exists no primordial

moment of foundation. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 142. Consider

also Machiavelli’s characterization of Romulus as the paradigmatic founder in

comparison to the Augustinian and Ciceronian depictions of Romulus. Characteristically,

Machiavelli endorses the Augustinian depiction, while severing that view from its

Augustinian corollary, i.e., Christ as the founder of the City of God. Cf. Augustine, City

of God 22.6, in which Augustine also reproduces Cicero’s depiction of Romulus in the

Republic. Finally, on these points, cf. Breiner, “Machiavelli’s ‘New Prince’ and the

Primordial Moment of Acquisition,” 66-92.

59 In this respect Machiavelli’s Camillus differs from Livy’s more pious Camillus. See

Livy 5.23.

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exile that Camillus evidently learned to be at once prudent and steadfast—in a word,

virtuous. Post-exile Camillus emerges as the embodiment of self-reliance for Machiavelli.

With Camillus as his exemplar, Machiavelli argues that “excellent men retain their same

dignity in every fortune,” because for “great men [who] are always the same . . . fortune

does not have power over them” (D 3.31.1). It was by chance, though, that Camillus was

recalled to Rome at all. According to Machiavelli, the “extrinsic accident” of the Gallic

invasion led the Romans to send for Camillus, “who alone could have been the sole

remedy for such an evil” (D 2.30.1). Moreover, Camillus arrived in the nick of time;

already the Romans were submitting to the terms of surrender set by the Gauls (D

2.30.1). In more than one way, then, Machiavelli presents Camillus’ re-founding of Rome

as accidental.

At the same time, Machiavelli argues that the republic did gain a significant

degree of control over fortune through Camillus’ renovation of Rome’s modes and

orders. Consider Discourse 3.31, which constitutes both Machiavelli’s last word on

Camillus and his final thematic statement on fortuna in the Discourses. The title of this

discourse is “Strong Republics and Excellent Men Retain the Same Spirit and Their Same

Dignity in Every Fortune.” Mansfield argues that “it is with regard to Machiavelli himself

that one must understand this passage”; for the passage seems to introduce a Stoic lesson

on equanimity, whereas the discourse as a whole recommends “a substituted hardness of

calculation in place of the noble and enduring qualities of soul.”60 I suggest that

60 Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 51-52; see also Mansfield, New Modes and Orders,

401-404.

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Machiavelli does not simply take a dim view of Stoicism. In Discourse 3.31, Machiavelli

puts Stoic equanimity to his own purposes, politicizing and democratizing it.

The argument of Discourse 3.31 proceeds as follows. First, Machiavelli points to

the example of Camillus in order to show that “great men are always the same in every

fortune; and if it varies—now by exalting them, now by crushing them—they do not vary

but always keep their spirit firm” (D 3.31.1). His next move is to say that “the virtue and

vice that I say are to be found in one man alone are also found in a republic” (D 3.31.2).

A captain can imprint his character on the citizens of the republic by re-founding the

republic’s modes and orders, especially its martial modes and orders. Machiavelli’s

Camillus re-ordered the republic “in every part, so as to be able to have men who have

spirit, and indeed the orders and modes of his proceeding”; otherwise, in fact, Camillus

would have “come to ruin” (D 3.31.4). By changing the tenor of its existence, its “mode

of life,” republican re-founding empowers a whole people to become and remain

ferocious in the face of serious misfortune:

For becoming insolent in good fortune and abject in bad arises from your

mode of proceeding and from the education in which you are raised. When

that is weak and vain, it renders you like itself; when it has been

otherwise, it renders you also of another fate; and by making you a better

knower of the world, it makes you rejoice less in the good and be less

aggrieved with the bad. What is said of one alone is said of many who live

one and the same republic: they are made to that perfection that its mode

of life has.

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Although it was said another time that the foundation of all states

is a good military, and that where this does not exist there can be neither

good laws nor any other good thing, it does not appear to me superfluous

to repeat it. (D 3.31.3-4)

This passage confirms that Machiavelli places equanimity at the core of princely

and republican virtue. Strength requires self-possession, the peculiar combination of

prudence and boldness that enables the extraordinary individual—and, under his tutelage,

the whole state—to face up to ostensible bad luck. However, Mansfield is right to argue

that Machiavelli parts company with Livy and Cicero in the decisive respect. Whereas for

the Stoics equanimity describes genuine indifference to the goods of fortune, Machiavelli

thinks that equanimity is good for the character of the prince and the republic because

action grounded in equanimity most often succeeds in winning the goods of fortune. Thus

we can explain why Machiavelli repeats, at the conclusion of the above passage, his old

saw on the fundamental importance of arms (P 12; D 1.4.1). What explains Rome’s

“greater life and good fortune” is, in particular, the quasi-Stoical martial education

authored by a series of princes of the city, especially Camillus. Machiavelli admires the

Roman education because such an education is a wellspring of efficacious power and

martial glory.

The Inconstancy of Machiavelli

Does Machiavelli’s unique treatment of Camillus answer the questions that we have

raised about the vulnerability of the prince and the republic to luck? On the one hand,

Machiavelli’s Camillus appears to be the rare prince who exercises control over his own

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character—albeit after learning, through bad luck, what virtue requires. In particular,

Camillus learned that indifference to good or bad luck allows one to remain coolheaded;

what’s more, Camillus made his understanding effectual by teaching the Romans to

imitate his boldness, if not his prudence. Having been remade in the image of Camillus,

Rome was, arguably, more stable and powerful. In the short term, Rome may have

contended, more successfully, with extrinsic accidents, especially the attack of the

Tuscans (D 3.30). Perhaps Camillus’ education of the Romans also produced, in the long-

term, multiple future leaders who shared his character, such as Titus Manlius Torquatus

(D 3.23-24). Thus the re-founding of Rome by Camillus may seem to represent a solution

to the problem of succession.

Yet this solution is merely partial. If the character of the whole republic is set by a

re-founder such as Camillus, Machiavelli begs the question: whence the re-founder?

Machiavelli offers no concrete advice for overcoming this regress, which is not to say

that he does not recognize the problem. The last of the Discourses states, in

uncompromising terms, the necessity of continuous innovation in the institutions and

practices of the republic. “Every day” Rome found itself in need of a “wise physician,”

that is, a Camillean re-founder, who could respond, prudently, to the intrinsic and

extrinsic accidents afflicting the republic (D 3.49; see also D 3.1). Of course, Rome did

not always succeed in discovering a re-founder rather than a corrupter, a Camillus rather

than a Caesar. Just as the vulnerability of the extraordinary individual to fortune leads the

reader from The Prince to the Discourses, so too does the vulnerability of the republic to

fortune lead him back to the topic of founding and hence to The Prince. It is appropriate,

in fact, that both The Prince and the Discourses conclude with unblinking

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acknowledgment of the vulnerability of the prince and the republic to fortune. If

Machiavelli had exaggerated the effectiveness of virtue in controlling fortune, then he

would have ceased to explain virtue and to teach it.

More questionable, however, is the quasi-Stoical ethos that Machiavelli ascribes

to Camillus. According to Seneca, for example, virtue “demands no external equipment.

It is home-grown, proceeding wholly from itself: it begins to be subject to fortune if it

attempts to derive any part of itself from without.”61 Original to Machiavelli is the idea

that equanimity constitutes virtue because equanimity succeeds in acquiring for the

individual and the republic the equipment that Seneca regards as superfluous, if not

downright damaging, to virtue. This is a paradox: for Machiavelli, it is advantageous to

cultivate internal superiority to fortune precisely because a person who possesses such a

character is most likely to succeed in winning the goods of fortune. How Seneca would

respond is patent: it makes no sense to look down on alterations in fortune unless one is

actually indifferent to the goods and evils those changes might bring. Doubtful, too, is the

psychological soundness of the Machiavellian ethos. How is it possible for an ambitious

individual—who wants, badly, to succeed, to win the goods of fortune—to cultivate

indifference to his own abjectness, as Machiavelli’s Camillus claims to have done?

Again, Machiavelli recognizes this problem. As we have seen, he argues that

experience, especially adverse experience, has the potential to teach the naturally talented

political actor that he can think straight when he distances himself from his successes and

61 I have slightly modified Barker’s translation, replacing “paraphernalia” with

“equipment.” See Seneca, “Letter IX,” 24.

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failures. Bad luck constitutes an opportunity for the princely individual to learn the limits

of his own power, which, paradoxically, may help him to acquire greater power. With the

help of luck, princes and princes of republics can become at least partially responsible for

their virtue.

Some modern political philosophers after Machiavelli seek to cut the Gordian

knot by conquering fortune once and for all, thereby relieving human beings of the

responsibility of virtue. The difference between Machiavelli and Hobbes, for example, is

that Hobbes attempts to create a new political form, the modern state, that will deliver

material well-being to the people irrespective of the character of the individuals who

exercise political authority. Hobbes indicates his departure from Machiavelli in the letter

dedicatory that precedes Leviathan. Whereas Machiavelli seizes on the invasion of Rome

by the Gauls as a signal instance of the paradoxical equation of bad luck with good luck,

since the invasion led to the rise of Marcus Furius Camillus and the re-founding of Rome,

Hobbes uses this episode to suggest that the state can be made invulnerable to luck.

Human beings can be relied upon to squawk like the Capitoline geese; what cannot be

relied upon is the virtue of a Camillus (or a Manlius Capitolinus or a Sidney

Godolphin).62 The political form that relies on ordinary passions rather than exceptional

persons does not leave itself exposed to the influence—worse, the absence—of the latter.

62 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1-2. In Chapter 29 of Leviathan, Hobbes argues that his

commonwealth is “designed to live as long as mankind” (210). That the perdurance of the

state should not depend on the character its leaders is a central plank of Hobbes’s critique

of republican liberty in Chapter 21. Of course, many modern political theorists follow

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Yet Machiavelli’s own reliance on exceptional persons invites a democratic

challenge. While Machiavelli argues that a prince could teach the people to hold firm in

the face of serious misfortune, he ultimately suggests that the people’s ability to do so

hinges wholly on the prince himself. This “top-down” view raises various questions: is it

possible that ordinary people exercise their own distinctive virtues and vices in the face

of apparent good or bad luck? Even more pointedly, is there a democratic politics of luck

that rivals Machiavelli’s princely-republican model in eschewing intoxication in good

luck and abjectness in bad? To address these questions, I return to Athens, where

Thucydides offered rich depictions and analyses of the place of luck in Athenian-

democratic politics.

Machiavelli by emphasizing the importance of virtue among both leaders and the people.

For example, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 115: “in the constitution of all

peoples, whatever the rest of its nature may be, there is a point at which the legislator is

obliged to rely on the good sense and virtue of its citizens. . . . There is no country where

the law can foresee everything and where institutions will take the place of reason and

mores.”

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CHAPTER 4: DELIBERATION AND DARING:

THUCYDIDES ON LUCK AND DEMOCRACY

This chapter primarily aims to investigate Periclean-Athenian perspectives on the idea of

luck as these perspectives come to light in Thucydides’ History.1 Many perspicacious

commentators on tuchē in Thucydides have caricatured Pericles’ statements on this topic.

For example, Lowell Edmunds argues at length that Thucydides’ Pericles “trivializes”

and “disparages chance,” and that his war “policy as it emerged in the first speech . . .

1 Although the literature on Thucydides’ Pericles is vast, it can be usefully (if somewhat

crudely) split into two approaches. Many scholars hold up Pericles as Thucydides’

exemplary statesman. Among these are Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian

Imperialism, 112: “Thucydides completely shares Pericles’ ideas” (see also 119);

Pouncey, The Necessities of War, 80; Euben, Tragedy of Political Theory, 178; Nichols,

Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 26. Others have argued, by contrast, that

Thucydides is a critic of Pericles in certain respects. See for example, Balot, Courage in

the Democratic Polis, 45-46, 109-28; Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean

Imperialism, 3-4; Mara, Civic Conversations, 114-16; Ober, “Thucydides

Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor,” 275-76; Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 27-29, 193-

197; Parry, “Thucydides’ Historical Perspective,” 47; Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and

Explanation, 205; Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 59-71; Stahl, Man’s Place in

History, 95-96. My study falls into the second group, though I think that Pericles’

deliberative rationality (gnōmē) and his regard for luck (tuchē) are exemplary, for

Thucydides himself, in various ways that I will explain.

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rested on the premise that chance was not a major factor in wars.”2 While Edmunds

correctly argues that Thucydides’ Pericles opposes deliberative rationality (gnōmē) to the

idea of luck (tuchē; see esp. 1.144.4), he fails to grasp that Pericles’ sensitivity to the

appearance of tuchē in war shapes his conception of gnōmē.3 In his so-called War

Speech, Pericles emphasizes the necessity of grand-strategic deliberation as one

indispensable way of anticipating, albeit without eliminating, war’s unlucky turnabouts

(1.140.1).4 Equally important, in the Funeral Oration and in his final speech to the

2 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 17, 71, 74; see also 43, 81, 144. I engage with

Edmunds’s seminal study throughout this chapter. See also Orwin, Humanity of

Thucydides, 25 n. 28, 170; Forde, Ambition to Rule, 60; Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and

Periclean Imperialism, 205; Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, 35-37, 47;

Monoson and Loriaux, “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” 289: “in order to find

Pericles’ strategy irresistible it is necessary to discount the power of chance (tychē).”

3 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, esp. 3, 147-48. Earlier articulations of the so-called

“gnōmē-tuchē antithesis” occur in Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 105-107;

Romilly, Mind of Thucydides, 104; Finley, Thucydides, 312-315. On 1.144.4, see the

commentary of Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 40.

4 References to Thucydides are inlaid in the text and refer to the text by book, chapter,

and line numbers as appropriate. My own translations and transliterations refer to the

Oxford Classical Text, edited by Jones and revised by Powell. Wherever possible, I use

the translation of Woodruff, Thucydides on Justice, Power, and Human Nature. Because

Woodruff has only translated selections of the History, I frequently rely instead on the

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Athenian Assembly, Pericles argues that the Athenians’ unique combination of both

daring and deliberation, tolma and gnōmē (2.40.3), empowers them to think and to act

well in the face of apparent good or bad luck. To hear Pericles tell it, the Athenians (and

above all Pericles) can explain to themselves why it makes sense to be courageous amid

what they perceive to be good fortune (2.43.5); conversely, in the face of ostensible bad

luck, their daring steels their judgment and fuels their resistance (2.64.6). In these

speeches, then, Pericles offers a distinctively democratic-Athenian response to the

Machiavellian question that we encountered in the prior chapter: how is it possible for

citizens to eschew becoming either intoxicated in good luck or abject in bad luck?

However, and as we will see, the History exposes the Athenians’ many failures to

measure up to the Periclean ideal of gnōmē. One Thucydidean answer to the

Machiavellian question posed above is that Pericles strategically managed the emotions

of the people through his rhetoric and his quasi-monarchic rule (2.65.9). After his death,

however, the Athenians allowed themselves to change their minds in accordance with

their perceived good or bad luck. In particular, Thucydides shows that the appearance of

good luck provoked the Athenians’ emotions, especially their hope (4.64.4); these

recent translation of Mynott, trans., Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the

Athenians; and I modify this translation as necessary. Other helpful editions include

Crawley, trans., The Landmark Thucydides, revised and edited by Strassler; and Hobbes,

trans., The Peloponnesian War, edited by David Grene. I have also benefited from the

commentaries of A.W. Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K.J. Dover, Historical Commentary;

and Hornblower, Commentary.

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emotions in turn corrupted their deliberative rationality in ways that I will track and

explain. At the same time, Thucydides marvels at the tolma displayed by the Athenians in

the wake of both the plague and the Sicilian expedition, disasters which the Athenians

themselves regarded as extremely unlucky (see esp. 7.28). Strikingly, in light of their

capacity to withstand serious misfortune, ordinary Athenians may have surpassed

Pericles’ own portrait of Athenian daring.5

Finally, since I aim to situate this discussion of Periclean Athens within a broader

consideration of the idea of luck in the History, the chapter begins and ends by addressing

objections and questions that expand the purview of the argument. For example, could it

be the case that Thucydides favors the Spartan civic discourse on luck over and against

the one articulated by Pericles?6 Moreover, how do Pericles’ reflections on Athenian

thought and action in the face of apparent good or bad luck interface with the

fundamental issues of agency, necessity, and responsibility that recur throughout the

5 In presenting Thucydides as an “entangled” critic of democratic Athens and of Pericles

in particular, I follow Ober, Political Dissent, 52-121; Balot, Courage in the Democratic

Polis, 25-46, 109-128; Saxonhouse, Free Speech, esp. 149-51; Mara, Civic

Conversations, 19-26. By using the language of entanglement, I intend to bring to mind

Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements.

6 See, for example, Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 147; Stahl, Man’s Place in

History, 95-96; Rahe, “Religion, Politics, and Piety,” 432.

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History?7 In fact, before it possible to elaborate and evaluate the civic discourse on luck

in Periclean Athens, it is necessary to offer a preliminary account of this idea as it figures

into Thucydides’ own conceptual vocabulary.

The Idea of Luck in the History

What is the meaning of tuchē for Thucydides, and what role does this idea play, if any, in

his historiography? Influential scholars have often reified tuchē in the History. According

to Adam Parry, for example, Thucydides uses tuchē to refer to “external reality at its

most incalculable, the aspect of it that is least accessible to logos.”8 A central lesson of

the History on Parry’s reading is that “man’s attempt to master the world by the intellect”

will founder on the shoals of “the world,” “outside things,” or “actuality,” which “in its

capacity as luck, will behave in an unreasonable way.”9 Similarly, in a celebrated yet

enigmatic line, Bernard Williams writes that Thucydides depicts human rationality “at

risk to chance.”10 Williams thinks that Thucydides anticipatively stands against the (pre-

7 For contrasting overviews of and approaches to these issues, see Orwin, Humanity of

Thucydides, 193-206; Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 25-28;

Zumbrunnen, Silence and Democracy, 66-124.

8 Parry, Logos and Ergon, 181. A similar line of argument can be found in Stahl, Man’s

Place in History, 95-96.

9 Parry, Logos and Ergon, 181-82, 186, 192.

10 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 164. Williams’s “rationality-at-risk” interpretation has

won many admirers. For example, see Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,”

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Nietzschean) tradition of European philosophy by denying to human reason the power to

make the world “safe” for human beings.11 No doubt, Thucydides starkly displays the

fragility of the human body (e.g., 2.51.3, 7.87.1-2). Virtue is so far from being a bulwark

against corporeal suffering that in certain dire circumstances—for example, during the

plague at Athens and during civil war at Corcyra—the virtuous die first, having refused

to compromise their virtue for the sake of their safety (2.51.5, 3.82.8).12 For Parry and

Williams, extreme bad luck is brutal: it can overwhelm reason and crush bones.13

219-233; Hornblower, Thucydidean Themes 6-7; Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics;

Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation, 292-93.

11 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 164; see also his “Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” 52.

12 On this point, see Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, esp. 176; and his “Beneath Politics,”

113-127.

13 Additional “tragic” or “pessimistic” readings of Thucydides include: Cornford,

Thucydides Mythistoricus; Stahl, Man’s Place in History, esp. 79-80, 186; Pouncey, The

Necessities of War; Colin Macleod, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” 140-58; Wohl, Euripides

and the Politics of Form, 117; Euben, Tragedy of Political Theory, 167-201; Euben,

“Creatures of a Day,” esp. 30: “Thucydides’s History is a tragedy in the largest sense.”

For a more recent “tragic” reading of the History that rehashes many of Euben’s themes

with the help of Heideggerian philosophy, see Darien Shanske, Thucydides and the

Philosophical Origins of History. For the argument that Thucydides was influenced by

Aeschylus in particular, see Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 129-73. Williams

suggests, more persuasively, that there is an affinity between Thucydides and Sophocles

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Is it clear, though, that the idea of luck refers to some destructive and mysterious

external force in Thucydides’ own view? True, Thucydides says that unforeseen

calamities of the kind flagged by Parry and Williams appeared to increase in both number

and magnitude during the war: “And things that in the past were reported on the basis of

hearsay, where the actual evidence was rather flimsy, now ceased to be incredible,”

including widespread earthquakes, eclipses, droughts, famines, “and the most damaging

thing of all . . . the deadly plague” (1.23.3). But why exactly did these formerly incredible

disasters engulf Greece at this moment? Thucydides’ explanation is that the war itself led

the Hellenes to invest significance in every striking and irregular event. For example, in

his comments on an earthquake that occurred at Delos just prior to the formal initiation of

hostilities, Thucydides writes that the earthquake “was said to be a sign of what was

going to happen afterwards, and people believed that. And if anything else of this sort

happened contingently (ei te ti allo toioutotropon xunebē genesthai), people started

looking for an explanation” (2.8.3; cf. 2.17.2, 2.54.3).14 The idea of luck preoccupied the

in Shame and Necessity, 163-64. For Thucydides and Euripides, see Wohl, Euripides and

the Politics of Form, 110-19; and Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides, 1-54. I am

sympathetic to these readings, as will become clear, but they often rely on inadequate

accounts of tuchē.

14 I have slightly modified Woodruff’s translation of the line, since he renders (xunebē) as

“by chance,” which should be reserved for kata tuchēn in my view. This line points to the

connection between the perception of bad luck and the pious dread of divine punishment.

In Chapter 2, we saw that, according to Aristotle, many people view luck as “something

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Hellenes because, during wartime, they found every contingent occurrence to be

significant.

For Thucydides himself, however, an earthquake is an event that demands

explanation in light of nature. For example, Thucydides offers a rigorously naturalistic

account of earthquakes on Euboea, focusing in particular on the earthquakes’ capacity to

produce tidal waves: “The cause of this phenomenon in my view is that at the point

where the force of the earthquake is greatest the sea retreats and then suddenly rushes

back with renewed power and so produces the inundation. Without the earthquake I do

not think anything like this would happen” (3.89.5). By contrast, the Spartans view

earthquakes as divine omens or punishments that sometimes directly respond to the

Spartans’ own injustices (e.g., 1.128.1). In fact, Thucydides routinely offers deflationary

and physical accounts of phenomena that his characters attribute to bad luck. Thucydides

identifies the time of both the month and the day as determining factors of an eclipse

(2.28). On the other hand, when the Athenian general Nicias witnesses an eclipse in

Sicily, his obsession with the idea of luck coupled with his superstitious piety leads to his

decision to stall the Athenian retreat, which paves the way for the army’s annihilation

(7.50.4). Most importantly, on the level of the war viewed as a whole, Thucydides

nowhere adduces luck as a cause in its own right. He points instead to the growth of

Athenian power and to the fear it inspired in the Spartans as the critical causes of the war

god-like” (Phys. 2.4.196b6). See also Strauss, “Preliminary Reflections on the Gods,” 89;

Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 88-89.

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(1.23.6, 1.88), while he points to the Athenians’ demagogic leadership after Pericles and

to their factional strife as the key causes of the city’s ultimate defeat (2.65.10-11).

Thus Geoffrey Hawthorn has remarked, with only slight exaggeration, “it is not

he but his characters who speak of tuche.”15 The implication of this fact is that, for

Thucydides, the idea of luck exists “in speech” rather than “in deed.”16 To say that a deed

happened by luck is to offer an account of that deed which implies or presupposes some

background explanation of what counts as good or bad luck. In the History, these

15 Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics, 235. More precisely, “of the forty occurrences of

tyche in the History only seven are in Thucydides’ own voice.” Edmunds, Chance and

Intelligence, 176. Edmunds goes on to offer a list of the occurrences of tuchē and its

cognates—e.g., dustuchia, eutuchia, dustuchēs, eutuchēs, suntuchia, and various forms of

tunchanō. More recently, Eidinow has added to this extensive list in Luck, Fate, and

Fortune, 122-142. I consider Thucydides’ own rare invocations of the idea of tuchē in the

chapter’s final section below.

16 While the relation of erga to logoi in the History is complex, Thucydides’

“methodological” reflections on his own historiography indicate the superior fidelity and

clarity of deeds over speeches (1.22.1-2). At the same time, Thucydides recognizes that

deeds do not speak for themselves, while speeches motivate deeds. On this topic, see

Parry, Logos and Ergon; Ober, Political Dissent, 53-63; Ober, “Thucydides

Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor,” 275-76; Euben, “Creatures of a Day,” esp. 48-49;

Immerwahr, “Ergon: History as Monument,” 275-90; Mara, “Thucydides and Political

Thought,” 105; and most recently, Jaffe, Thucydides on the Outbreak, 10-15.

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background explanations are lodged in regime-specific civic discourses—for example, on

the topics of luck, virtue, error, and the gods—and in the minds of the statesmen who

articulate and inflect these discourses in accordance with their own characters and ideas.

By rendering the speeches of these statesmen, Thucydides invites the reader not only to

judge their conceptual frameworks, but also to judge the deeds of the individuals and

cities who embody them. How should citizens think and act in the face of outcomes that

they themselves may regard as seriously lucky or unlucky? What virtues enable citizens

to control themselves no matter the appearance of either good or bad luck? Even though

Thucydides himself takes a skeptical approach to the idea of luck, these questions remain

central to his critical political history, because the idea of luck powerfully shapes the

intellectual beliefs, emotions, and deeds of the Athenians and the Spartans—and,

consequently, the evolution of the whole war.

Pericles on Deliberation, Daring, and Luck

Characteristic Athenian perspectives on the idea of luck emerge in the speeches that set

the stage for and partially cause the commencement of the war in 431 B.C. Speaking

before the Spartan assembly and the representatives of Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies

about the impending war, the Athenian envoys, “who already happened to be present” in

Sparta on other business (1.72.1), conclude their speech by appealing to luck: “Before

you go to war, you must realize how unpredictable (paralogon) war is. The longer it lasts

the more it is likely to turn on luck” (tuchas; 1.78.1-2). From this commonplace about the

outsized role of luck in war, the Athenians conclude that it would be imprudent for the

Spartans to open hostilities absent careful deliberation. They warn the Spartans that

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“people tend to go into war the wrong way around, starting with action (ergōn) and

turning to discussion (logōn) only after they have come to harm” (kakopathountes;

1.78.3). The Athenians’ advice, offered in the imperative mood, is to “deliberate”

(bouleuesthe), slowly and carefully (1.78.1).

On the one hand, the Athenians undoubtedly advert to the unpredictability of war

because they aim to persuade the notoriously cautious Spartans (e.g., 1.70.2-4, 1.118.2,

8.96.5) not to invade Attica, but to submit to arbitration instead (1.78.4). On the other

hand, the Athenian envoys state for the first time in the History a characteristic Athenian

perspective on luck. For the Athenians, the possibility of bad luck in war demands action

informed by deliberation. Cynthia Farrar puts the point well: “The Athenians

acknowledge the role of chance, particularly in military conflicts, but emphasize that

human reason can be effective in avoiding the unknowable, risky consequences of war.”17

Also apposite are the words of the Athenian statesman Diodotus: “He is stupid if he

thinks that there is anything other than words that we can use to consider what lies hidden

(mē emphanous) from sight in the future” (3.42.2). Speech alone, if anything, will help us

to clarify the best course of action amid uncertainty and danger.

The most penetrating account of the Athenians’ deliberative rationality in relation

to the idea of luck occurs in the speeches of Pericles. In his so-called War Speech,

Pericles urges the Athenians to support his judgment in favor of war, though he worries

that they will abandon this judgment once the fighting begins. In order to explain why the

Athenians must cleave to whatever course of action they deliberately choose at this

17 Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking, 179.

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moment, Pericles limns a complex relation of gnōmē to tuchē. Consider the opening lines

of the speech:

My judgment (tēs men gnōmēs) has always been the same, Athenians:

don’t give into the Peloponnesians. Of course I know the passion that

leads people into war does not last when they’re actually engaged in it;

people change their minds (tas gnōmas) with the circumstances. But I see

I must still give nearly the same advice now as I gave before; and I insist

that if you agree to this as common policy you support it even if things go

badly for us—otherwise you have no right to boast of your intelligence if

all goes well, since events can turn out as stupidly (amathōs) as people’s

plans, and that is why we usually blame luck when things don’t turn out as

expected.” (di’ hoper kai tēn tuchēn, hosa an para logon sumbē,

eiōthamen aitiasthai; 1.140.1)

These arresting lines—Pericles’ first in the History—have elicited extensive commentary.

According to the influential reading of Ronald Syme, for example, Pericles was

“speaking ironically, as befits an intellectual and one of the men of understanding whom

Thucydides admired.”18 In particular, Syme senses irony in Pericles’ metaphorical

ascription of stupidity to events influenced by bad luck. Pericles’ true belief, on Syme’s

reading, is that luck is merely an excuse invoked by those who refuse to acknowledge

that their own stupidity prevented them from fully envisioning and planning for the

18 Syme, Thucydides, 56.

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future.19 Similarly, Edmunds writes that Pericles “make[s] planning primary,” while

“chance . . . is reduced to the same status as human error.”20 On this reading, gnōmē is

capable of overcoming tuchē according to Pericles himself.

In my view, however, Pericles is serious when he says that “events can turn out as

stupidly as people’s plans, and that is why we usually blame luck when things do not turn

out as we expected.” His point is that, whatever happens, the Athenians should judge

their grand strategy by the quality of the gnōmē that informs it, and not by their shifting

fortunes in the war.21 While Syme may be right to suggest that, as “a man of

19 Syme, Thucydides, 56.

20 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 17; see also 81. Edmunds also suggests, on p. 19,

that Pericles echoes Democritus’ fragment B 119, which he translates as follows: “Men

have moulded an image of chance as an excuse for their own ill-advisedness. For seldom

does chance contend with prudence (phronēsei). A quick sharp-sightedness sets right

most of life’s affairs.” As we will see, Thucydides indeed shows that men use the image

of luck as an excuse for their errors, though he doubts that phronēsis can set right most of

life’s affairs by itself. Others who argue that intelligence can overcome luck in Pericles’

own view include Forde, The Ambition to Rule, 60; Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and

Periclean Imperialism, 205; Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, 35-37, 47;

Monoson and Loriaux, “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” 289.

21 Allison gestures in this direction when she writes that “the introduction to [Pericles’]

first speech opens in fact with an affirmation of gnōmē (reasoning, sound policy), but

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understanding,” Pericles does not countenance pious or superstitious deference toward

tuchē, and while Edmunds is undoubtedly correct to argue that Pericles “makes planning

primary,” Pericles still thinks that it makes more sense to hold bad luck responsible for

the undesirable result of a good plan than it does to decide that the plan was bad simply

because it miscarried.22 Trusting in deliberative rationality rather than in its results will

help the Athenians to deliberate more perspicaciously beforehand and to stick to their

grand strategy in the event of an unlucky reversal. Eschewing the crude view that virtue

necessarily conquers fortune, Pericles invokes the idea of tuchē to emphasize both the

limits of gnōmē and the importance of exercising its full capacity. Like Themistocles

closes with a balanced view about chance events.” See Allison, “Pericles’ Policy and the

Plague,” 18; and Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides, 26.

22 Even if Pericles denies that luck is an external force that acts on human beings in

mysterious and uncontrollable ways, it does not follow that everything that happens

contrary to plan can be reduced to bad planning. Mynott comments on 1.140.1, The War,

84: “amathōs . . . is an arresting choice of word. The core meaning is ‘without learning’

or ‘stupidly’ but it is applied here somewhat metaphorically to events, which in English

we can talk of as being senseless.” See also Hornblower, Commentary, 226. I make much

the same point in my interpretation of Machiavelli in Chapter 3. Virtue is not equivalent

to success for either Pericles or Machiavelli.

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before him, Pericles relies on his intelligence (xunesis) to “see in advance the better and

worse options in a still uncertain future” (1.138.3; cf. 2.65.5-6).23

Contra Edmunds, then, Pericles does not say that “chance [is] not a major factor

in wars.”24 To be sure, Pericles predicts an Athenian victory, so long as the Athenians

eschew hoplite warfare in Attica and focus instead on maintaining their empire and

therewith their massive superiority over the Peloponnesians in both ships and cash

(1.141.2-143).25 Yet Pericles hardly guarantees success.26 In fact, near the conclusion of

the speech, he sounds “a note of caution,” in the words of Ober, worrying for a second

time that the Athenians will allow the circumstances of the war to influence their strategic

thinking (1.141.1).27 While Pericles had initially warned that bad luck could cause the

23 On the foresight of Themistocles, see Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 40;

Euben, “Creatures of a Day,” 38; Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 9-10; Hornblower,

Commentary, 223; Blösel, “Thucydides on Themistocles,” 234-35. Foster persuasively

establishes that Thucydides links the two figures in Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean

Imperialism, 130. See also Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperailism, 119.

24 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 71.

25 “Walls, ships, and cash” are key material constituents of power according to

Thucydides. For this terminology, see Ober, “Thucydides Theoretikos/Thucydides

Histor,” 276-79.

26 Cf. Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 95.

27 On this “note of caution,” see Ober, Political Dissent, 82; Romilly, Thucydides and

Athenian Imperialism, 116.

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Athenians to abandon the Periclean plan, his second statement of this theme suggests,

conversely, that the Athenians could become overly hopeful in good fortune. Success in

the war might entice the Athenians to “take new risks,” that is, to attempt to enlarge the

empire. Thus Pericles’ War Speech raises the Machiavellian question: how can the

Athenians avoid becoming intoxicated in good luck and abject in bad?

The Funeral Oration addresses the first part of this question. For one of the

rhetorical challenges that Pericles sets for himself in this speech is to persuade his

Athenian audience that it would be good to fight and die on behalf of the city, thereby

giving up the “good fortune” of living in democratic Athens (2.44.2). Riffing on Solonian

themes, Pericles argues that “miserable men, who have no hope of prosperity, do not

have a just reason to be generous with their lives; rather, those who face the danger of a

complete reversal of fortune . . . should risk their lives” (2.43.5).28 Because the human

condition “teems with all sorts of unlucky calamities (en polutropois gar xumphorais

epistantai traphentes; 2.44.1),” even the parents of the fallen should believe that “it is

good luck (eutuchēs) for anyone to draw a glorious end for his lot (lachōsin),” as did their

sons (2.44.1). More fundamentally, for Pericles, citizens are motivated to fight and die for

Athens because the flourishing life of democratic citizenship and the demands of war

28 On the verbal and thematic connections between Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the

speech of Herodotus’ Solon to Croesus, see Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 76-84;

Scanlon, “Echoes of Herodotus in Thucydides,” 143-76; Baragwanath, “A Noble

Alliance,” esp. 337. See also Shapiro, “Herodotus and Solon,” 348-64.

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make such action choiceworthy.29 Having seen both the contribution of daring to the

flourishing life of the democratic citizen and the susceptibility of all human beings to bad

luck, the Athenians show an appropriate readiness to end their lives on the battlefield. In

this way they give a new Athenian-democratic meaning to the dismal Solonian dictum—

“look to the end.”30 For whereas Herodotus’ Solon supposes that the individual’s

ineluctable vulnerability to bad luck means that one cannot call a man happy until he is

dead, Pericles claims that the Athenians may cut off the possibility of future bad luck by

choosing to die, gloriously, for Athens. In the Funeral Oration as in the War Speech, then,

Pericles urges the Athenians to rely on their gnōmē without forgetting about tuchē.

Indeed, gnōmē actually requires attention to the possibility of bad luck, even and

especially under conditions of good fortune, which always admit of reversal.

In Pericles’ final speech, his second to the Athenian Assembly, he treats, of

necessity, the second part of the Machiavellian question—the Athenians’ capacity to

withstand serious misfortune. During 430 B.C., the second year of the war, the plague

and the Spartans’ second incursion into Attica weighed heavily upon the Athenians.

29 Balot writes that, for Pericles, “the polis is worth risking one’s life for because of its

practices (epitēdeuseōs), its regime (politeias), and its way of life or character (tropōn)—

all of which have made the city great and its citizens’ lives free and flourishing (2.36.4,

2.38).” See Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 30; and the likeminded interpretation

of Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 35-36. Cf. Orwin, Humanity of

Thucydides, esp. 25.

30 See Herodotus, History 1.32.

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Thucydides observes that for these reasons the Athenians “changed their minds”

(ēlloiōnto tas gnōmās; 2.59.3). In particular, they blamed Pericles and his war plan for

their “misfortunes” (2.59.3)—a turnabout that Pericles had foreseen in his War Speech, at

least in part (1.140.1). Having called a meeting of the Assembly, Pericles describes the

plague as an instance of extreme bad luck that has caused the Athenians’ gnōmē to crack:

“now that you have been visited by this great reversal (metabolēs megalēs)—with very

little warning—you lack the strength of mind (dianoia) to persevere with the policy you

decided on. For the spirit (phronēma) is crushed when something so sudden, unexpected,

and completely unaccountable (to pleistō paralogō xumbainōn) comes along; and that is

what has happened to you, especially as regards the plague” (2.61.2-3).31 Yet Pericles

remains defiant. Bad luck in the form of the plague provides an occasion for Pericles to

theorize Athenian resilience and to demand that his fellow citizens exhibit it.

In so doing, Pericles focuses on the Athenian character itself. For Pericles, the

despondent Athenians need above all to rediscover both their judgment and their daring

(tolma) or courage (andreia).32 Consider the stirring last line of the speech: “The most

31 Trans. Mynott, slightly modified.

32 I regard andreia and tolma as more or less synonymous, since Pericles shuttles back

and forth between the two terms (cf. 2.39.4 and 2.40.3 among other passages). But Forde

helpfully notes that, apart from Pericles, other characters in the work use tolma in

contradistinction to andreia in their characterizations of the Athenians. See Forde, The

Ambition to Rule, 18 n. 5. The whole of Forde’s treatment of Athenian daring merits

consideration.

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powerful cities and individuals are the ones who, with respect to misfortune, least lose

their minds and most stand their ground” (2.64.6).33 Since courage is the virtue

quintessentially embodied by those who stand their ground on the battlefield, at least

according to Aristotle (see NE 3.6.1115a24-35), this line implies that gnōmē and tolma

are, for Pericles, complementary characteristics that enable the Athenians to confront

events that they themselves regard as unlucky. On a more general level, moreover,

Pericles often twins Athenian deliberation and daring, and he champions these virtues as

uniquely efficacious and worthy of pride (see esp. 1.144.4 and 2.40.3).34

However, commentators who seize on the antithesis between gnōmē and tuchē in

the speeches of Pericles often ignore tolma.35 After all, if deliberative rationality at its

33 My translation.

34 On the Athenians ability to unite these two characteristics, which were traditionally

seen as opposites, see Manville, “Pericles and the ‘Both/And’ Vision,” 73-84.

35 For example, Edmunds identifies Periclean gnōmē as a kind of technical rationality,

and he is silent on Pericles’ account of the ethical virtues. See Edmunds, Chance and

Intelligence, 74; Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, 119-120. See the

remark of Polus in Plato’s Gorgias 448c (trans. Arieti and Barrus): “Chaerephon, many

technical skills have been discovered experientially among men by experience.

Experience, you see, makes life proceed by technical skill, inexperience by chance. And

of each of these various men have various shares variously, and of the best things the best

men have a share, and Gorgias is among these best and has a share of the most beautiful

of the technical skills.” See also Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement.

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peak has the capacity fully to foresee and to control future events, then deliberation itself

would be a source of the utmost self-confidence, rendering daring all but dispensable. On

this account, Pericles prefigures the Platonic Socrates in supposing, paradoxically, that all

the ethical virtues represent subspecies of wisdom. One line in Pericles’ final speech

lends some support to this hyper-cognitive reading: “When luck (tuchēs) is not a factor

on either side it is intelligence (xunesis) . . . that fortifies daring (tolman), placing its trust

less in hope (elpidi), whose force depends on desperation, than in judgment (gnōmē)

based on the facts, which offers more reliable foresight” (pronoia; 2.62.5). For Pericles,

courage indeed demands the guidance of judgment—as do all the ethical virtues if they

are to issue in efficacious action. Note, however, the line’s first clause: what happens

when luck is a factor that impedes judgment?

Viewed as whole, the speech suggests that when bad luck threatens to overwhelm

judgment, then daring is critical; consequently, daring must be considered an excellence

of character separate from judgment.36 In Pericles own words: “Remember that the

reason why Athens has the greatest name in the world is because she never yielded to

misfortunes but has to an extraordinary degree lavished her lives and labors upon war”

(2.64.3). In this way Pericles lends support to the Corinthians’ portrait of the Athenian

36 By arguing that Pericles conceptualizes courage as an important ethical virtue in its

own right, I follow Balot, for whom “Pericles develops a composite view of courage that

that requires both a properly habituated character and intellectual understanding.” See

Balot, “Pericles’ Anatomy of Democratic Courage,” 506; and Courage in the Democratic

Polis, esp. 34-39.

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character, put forth in the first Peloponnesian conference at Sparta: “They are daring

beyond their power (para dunamin tolmētai), they run risks beyond their judgment (para

gnōmēn kinduneutai), and in danger they remain hopeful” (1.70.3).37 This Corinthian

comment on Athenian daring is helpful, in fact, insofar as it reveals that daring can cut

against the grain of judgment, not to mention justice. As the quality that animates

Athenian imperialism, and hence the Athenian atrocities committed at Scione (5.32.1)

and Melos (5.116), Athenian daring is an ambiguous and questionable characteristic.38

Yet Pericles himself champions both Athenian bellicosity and the empire, and his rhetoric

in 430 aims to stoke the fire of Athenian daring. By implication, for Pericles, just as

gnōmē can fortify tolma through its capacity to envision possible future outcomes, so too

tolma can fortify gnōmē through its capacity to activate judgment and to transform

thought into action even when terrifying circumstances threaten to become paralyzing.

Note, however, that in Pericles’ final speech he does not simply call on the

Athenians to return to their better selves by exhibiting both daring and deliberation.

Instead he tries to restore their judgment and inflame their daring through the use of his

full rhetorical arsenal—shaming (2.60.4, 2.64.2-3), threatening (2.63.2), and exhorting

37 My translation.

38 See Forde, The Ambition to Rule, 18-19: “The primary effect of Athenian daring seems

to be the empire.” Also note that Athenian atrocities were not restricted to Scione and

Melos. Consider the actions of Paches at Notium, for example (3.34).

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them (2.62.2, 2.645-6). And the speech works, at least “at the level of public policy”;39 as

a direct result of it, in Thucydides’ view, the Athenians “committed themselves more

wholeheartedly to the war” (2.65.2) Indeed, this speech immediately precedes and

supports Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles as a master statesman-rhetorician in the proto-

Machiavellian mold: “whenever he saw them insolently bold out of season, he would put

fear into them with his speeches; and again, when they were afraid without reason, he

would raise up their spirits and give them courage” (2.65.9).40 So powerful was Pericles’

rhetoric that Thucydides says that he ruled the people of Athens quasi-monarchically,

undermining the democracy itself (2.65.9).41 Thucydides also indicates that Pericles

understood his separateness from the demos and his power over them. For example,

Pericles frequently juxtaposes his own unwavering gnōmē to that of the fickle people,

39 “The outcome is success for Pericles at the level of public policy and failure at the

private level. He is fined and removed from office, although only temporarily.” Connor,

Thucydides, 59. But in light of the anger (orgē) that the Athenians felt toward Pericles

before he delivered the speech, the slap-on-the-wrist that they gave to him after it may

count as a success. In any case, Thucydides does not reveal the reason for the fine. On

this point see Gomme, Historical Commentary, 182-83.

40 By contrast, Plato’s Socrates frequently cuts Pericles down to size when he says in both

the Gorgias and the Menexenus that Pericles’ power arose out of his willingness to flatter

the demos. See Plato Gorgias, 515c-519c; Menexenus, 235e-236a. See also Monoson,

“Remembering Pericles,” 489-513.

41 See Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 63.

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who cannot control their orgē (anger; 1.140.1, 1.143.5, 2.60.1, 2.60.4-5, 2.64.1). For

Pericles as for Thucydides, then, one answer to our Machiavellian question is that the

Athenians required a Pericles to manipulate their emotions and to balance out their

character—by turns amplifying their gnōmē and their tolma.

Periclean Athens Exposed

Do the Athenians in fact eschew intoxication in good luck and abjectness in bad luck

through the exercise of their distinctive virtues or through the leadership of Pericles or

other statesmen? Thucydides invites the reader to test Pericles’ claims against the deeds

performed by the Athenians themselves. To adapt Josiah Ober’s useful interpretative

framework to my own argument, Thucydides Histor implicitly criticizes Pericles

Theoretikos.42 By highlighting the decay in Athenian leadership after Pericles,

Thucydides suggests that Pericles himself did not realize the extent to which his own

quasi-monarchic rule had rendered the demos overly dependent upon him. Thucydides’

Athens resembles Machiavelli’s Rome: the success of both republics hinges on the

contingent presence of “enlightened statesmen . . . at the helm”—in particular, on the

ability of Periclean or Camillean statesmen to persuade and to lead the people in the most

exigent or unfortunate circumstances.43

42 Ober, “Thucydides Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor,” 275-76.

43 Madison, “Federalist No. 10,” 43: “It is vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be

able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good.

Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. . . .” See also Strauss, City and

153

At the same time, investigating the Athenians’ responses to good or bad luck after

Pericles reveals the specific failures of the people to adjust to good or bad luck. While

Pericles had said that the Athenians should trust in their deliberative rationality rather in

their shifting fortunes in the war, Thucydides shows that in fact the Athenians often

placed their trust in and took credit for their good luck. In so doing, the Athenians

corrupted their deliberative rationality in multiple respects. According to Thucydides,

conflating good luck with virtue inflamed the Athenians’ hopes beyond the limits of their

power to realize them. Consider his commentary on the Athenians’ unbounded

hopefulness in the wake of their lucky victory at Pylos and their capture of the Spartiates

on Sphacteria (4.39-41):

For such was their current run of good fortune (eutuchia) that the

Athenians felt the right to expect that nothing could go wrong for them,

but they could accomplish the possible and impracticable alike, no matter

with a large force or a weaker one. The reason for this attitude was the

success (eupragia) of most of their undertakings, which was unpredictable

(para logon) and so added to the strength of their hopes. (elpidos; 4.65.4)

In light of their good fortune, the Athenians decline to deliberate, to think strategically

about the war, even as they congratulate themselves and hope for further successes. In

fact, Thucydides reports that prior to their defeats at Delium and Amphipolis the

Man, 153: Periclean Athens “saved democracy from itself and increased Athens’ power

and splendor beyond anything achieved earlier but it had to rely constitutionally on

elusive chance: on the presence of a Pericles.” See also Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 28.1.

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Athenians thought that their eutuchia augured their “final victory” (5.14.1). A similar

dynamic marks the Sicilian debate: Nicias’ attempt to steer the Athenians’ deliberation

toward a sober assessment of material factors cannot quell the Athenians’ intense hope

for the expedition’s success; indeed, it has the opposite effect (6.24). Although Athenian

leaders—from Pericles (2.62.5) to Cleon (3.39.3) to the Athenian envoys to Melos

(5.103)—deride those who hope for good luck, the Athenian people exemplify the

delusive power of good luck to engage hope. Thus Diodotus holds up a mirror to the

Athenian character when he constructs a dynamic relation between hope and good luck in

his account of human motivation: hope attends upon the possibility of good luck, while

good luck increases hope (3.45.5-6).44

Moreover, many Athenian leaders also betray their susceptibility to wild

hopefulness borne of good luck. During the summer of 426, Thucydides depicts

Demosthenes “placing his hope” for the issue of the Aetolian campaign “in fortune” (tē

tuchē elpisas; 3.97.2); in the ensuing battle, he lost one-hundred twenty hoplites, whom

Thucydides calls “the best of all that died in this war from the city of Athens” (3.98.4).

So too Cleon indulged the hope, arising out of his good luck (eutuchia) at Pylos, that he

would end Brasidas’ campaign in Thrace (5.7.3). But the battle at Amphipolis resulted in

the death of six hundred on the Athenian side, including Cleon himself; on the other side,

a mere seven Peloponnesians lost their lives (5.11.2). Of course, it was the hopeful and

44 On hope in the History, see Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 157, 201; Schlosser,

“Thucydides, Hope, Politics,” 169-82; Ober and Perry, “Thucydides as a Prospect

Theorist,” 206-32; Ahrensdorf, “Fear of Death,” 589-90.

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delusional Athenian people who decided to send Cleon to Pylos in the first place—a

“crazy” (maniōdēs) decision in Thucydides’ own view (4.39.3; see also 4.28.3-5, 5.2.1).

Equally important, because the Athenians expect their ventures to succeed, when

one fails instead they mete out severe punishments to both the speakers who proposed the

venture and the generals who undertook it (2.59, 2.65.3, 2.70.4, 3.43.5, 3.98.5, 3.114.2,

4.65, 5.26.5, 5.46.4, 7.14.4, 7.48.4, 8.1.2; see also 6.103.4 for a Syracusan example).

Blame for the city’s misfortunes often falls upon individual leaders, including

Thucydides himself (5.26.5)—no matter the fact that the people authorize the city’s

military expeditions and elect its generals in the assembly (8.1.2). Note the context of the

block-quote reproduced above, Thucydides’ comment on Athenian hope: ten years prior

to the Sicilian expedition, the Athenians exiled two generals and fined another on the

grounds that they had been bribed to leave Sicily (4.65). But the Sicilians had in fact

made peace among themselves in order to expel the Athenians, having been persuaded to

do so by the Syracusan statesman Hermocrates (4.58-4.65.1). It is unclear what the

Athenians could have done with a relatively small force to press their advantage against

the united Sicilians. Considering the failure of the subsequent expedition, in fact, the

Athenian generals undoubtedly made a wise decision to leave.

That the hopeful Athenians punished these generals foreshadows Nicias’ fateful

choice to keep the Athenian force in Sicily in spite of disintegrating conditions.

“Knowing the Athenian character as he did, he had no wish to be unjustly put to death by

the Athenians on some dishonorable charge; but would rather take his chance

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(kinduneusas) and die at the hands of the enemy” (7.48.4).45 The well-known proclivity

of the Athenian demos to react in anger against generals who fail to control the

contingencies of war leads Nicias to take a catastrophic risk. His choice is all the more

striking when one remembers that, according to Thucydides himself, Nicias desired

above all “to protect his good fortune . . . he thought the best way of doing this was to

avoid taking risks and to expose oneself as little as possible to luck” (5.16.1). The

possible annihilation of the Athenian forces in Sicily scares Nicias less than the punitive

Athenian demos. The ironic result is that Nicias is left to trust in luck; indeed, to the end,

when it has become clear that the Athenians will never return home, Nicias issues

pathetic and quixotic exhortations to his soldiers to “remember the uncertainty of war (en

tois polemois paralogōn), and prepare to renew the fight in the hope that luck (tēs tuchēs)

will not always be set against us” (7.61.3).

Moreover, although the demos itself may not grasp when and how it expresses its

own emotions, including its tendency to grow hopeful with the appearance of good luck,

various leaders do grasp these patterns, and they use this knowledge for their own

45 Nicias outs himself as a hypocrite: he had said in the Sicilian Debate, with Socratic

flair, that “the responsibility of office [is] to do everything you can to help your city, or at

least never to harm it knowingly” (5.14). Cf. the words of Socrates in Plato’s Apology,

28d (trans. West): “Wherever someone stations himself, holding that it is best, or

wherever he is stationed by a ruler, there he must stay and run the risk, as it seems to me,

and not take into account death or anything else compared to what is shameful.” See also

Laws 860d and Protagoras 345e.

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purposes. During the Sicilian debate, Alcibiades advises the demos to vote for the

expedition, commanded by Nicias and Alcibiades himself, “since I am in my prime and

Nicias is held to be lucky” (eutuchēs; 6.17.1). Alcibiades began his speech by asserting

that Athens rightly disdains its unlucky citizens, while empowering and glorifying its

meritorious citizens (6.16.4)—an extreme restatement of the Periclean emphasis on merit

in the Funeral Oration (2.37.1). In this context, the mention of Nicias’ luck works as a dig

at Nicias, who was Alcibiades’ personal enemy (6.15.2), since it raises the question of

Nicias’ merit.46 At the same time, Alcibiades suggests, with a straight face, that the

apparent luck of Nicias portends the success of the venture. Although Alcibiades places

his own trust in merit over and against luck, he seems to recognize that the demos trusts

in luck.47 Alcibiades invokes Nicias’ luck in order to elicit the people’s hope. He wants

the demos to vote for the expedition, and he is willing to mislead them to achieve this

result (6.12.2, 6.15.2).

46 Cf. Forde, Ambition to Rule, 82: Alcibiades “seems to assume that great good fortune is

a kind of personal gift, in the manner of those who are said to be beloved of the gods.”

But Alcibiades places his emphasis on the fact that he is axios, worthy of command,

rather than merely eutuchēs, the epithet he reserves, sneeringly, for Nicias.

47 As Saxonhouse has recognized in Free Speech, 171, Alcibiades’ ability to mislead the

demos rests on his superior insight into the Athenian character. See also Ober, Political

Dissent, 111.

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Leaving Athens behind for a moment, an even more salient example of luck used

as rhetoric—in the manipulative, sophistic sense48—occurs in the speeches of

Hermocrates.49 On the one hand, Hermocrates trumpets his own foresight, accurately

anticipating Athens’ ambition to conquer Sicily, and urging the Sicilians to unite in the

face of the Athenian threat (4.61.6-7, 6.33). Thucydides praises Hermocrates for his

intelligence (xunesis; 6.72.2), and events fall out exactly as Hermocrates had predicted.

On the other hand, Hermocrates seems to emphasize the limits placed by luck on the

power of human intelligence: “the incalculable element in the future (to astathmēton tou

mellontos) exercises the widest influence” (4.62.4); “no one can so regulate the outcomes

of fortune (tuchēs) as to match them with his own desires” (6.78.2). The resolution of this

apparent contradiction lies in the fact that Hermocrates defers to the power of luck only

when speaking before other Sicilian cities in his speeches at Gela (4.59-64) and Camarina

(6.76-80). By contrast, the speech that he delivers before his fellow Syracusans does not

mention luck, but instead lays out a grand imperial vision for Syracuse (6.33-34). Clifford

Orwin’s formulation of this vision is neat: “Hermocrates casts Athens as the new Mede,

Syracuse as the new Athens—and himself as the new Themistocles” (6.33.6).50 Only

48 For an account of this distinction, see Eugene Garver, “Deception in Aristotle’s

Rhetoric,” 75-94.

49 On Hermocrates’ rhetoric, see Orwin, Humanity, 163-71; Farber and Fauber,

“Hermocrates and Thucydides.” Cf. Monoson and Loriaux, who downplay Hermocrates’

imperial ambitions in “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” esp. 294-95.

50 Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 167.

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when Hermocrates wants to fool non-Syracusan Sicilians into thinking that the

Syracusans are not contriving to conquer the island, but are merely preparing to repel the

Athenian threat, does he present himself as an ordinary Dorian, fearful of the

unpredictable future. Of course, Hermocrates and the Syracusans were not ordinary

Dorians. Thucydides says that the Syracusans, in contradistinction to the Spartans, “were

most like the Athenians in character and also their most successful opponents” (8.96.5).

What made the Syracusans most like the Athenians was the daring of their ordinary

democratic citizens and the deliberative rationality of their statesmen, especially

Hermocrates.

Returning to Athens by way of Syracuse, then, although Thucydides shows that

the appearance of good luck infects Athenian gnōmē with various pathologies of

democratic deliberation, he simultaneously shows, perhaps surprisingly, that the

democratic Athenians lived up to and even surpassed the Periclean and Corinthian

depictions of their tolma.51 No matter their errors, Thucydides marvels at the Athenians’

irrepressible daring: that they continued to wage war in spite of the ravages of the plague;

that they beat back the Peloponnesians for twenty-seven years; that they undertook a war

of equal size in Sicily; that they continued to besiege Syracuse even after the construction

of the Spartan fort at Deceleia; that they carried on the war for eight years after the loss of

51 Cf. Euben, for whom both Athenian daring and deliberation have become wholly

corrupt by the end of the war; thus Athens required a Socrates for the revivification of its

democratic political culture. Euben, “Creatures of a Day,” 37; and “The Battle of Salamis

and the Origins of Political Theory,” esp. 378-83.

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the Sicilian expedition; and that they might not have been defeated in 405 were it not for

their own civic strife (2.65.12, 7.28.3, 8.1.3-4, 8.24.5, 8.106.5). In Thucydides’ own

words: “it was incredible that in their display of power and daring they could so confound

the Greeks” (7.28.3). In fact, “no one would have believed it possible” that the Athenians

could undertake two wars at the same time, exhibiting the most extreme “love of victory

(philonikia) in each,” until it came to pass (7.28.3). Perhaps Pericles’ conservative war

policy and his fevered, almost hysterical appeals to Athenian daring in his final speech

reflect his underestimation of the daring of ordinary Athenians, especially in dire and

unexpected circumstances.

In support of this point, the eighth book of the History shows that the Athenians

did not yield in the face of disasters such as the loss of the Sicilian expedition and the

revolts of Chios and Euboea (8.1.3-4, 8.15.2, 8.96-97). The Athenian demos exhibited its

greatest daring during these moments of serious misfortune.52 Interestingly, Thucydides

also says that these disasters made the people more orderly and less jealous of its power.

Whatever was necessary to preserve the city and the empire the demos accepted—even

resolving to limit its own power for the sake of good government (8.97.2). In

Thucydides’ own words: “And in the panic of the moment the they were ready to accept

good order in everything, as the people tend to do in such circumstances” (8.1.4). That

the Athenians were able to evince appropriate fear (deos) and hence to control their fear

52 On Athenian resilience, see Balot, “Was Thucydides a Political Philosopher?,” 330-31.

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amid disasters that threatened Athens is a significant fact.53 For the expression of

appropriate fear in response to truly terrifying circumstances is itself characteristic of a

daring or courageous person.54 Perhaps Pericles and other Athenian leaders did not

understand that fear rather than hope was, on balance, “the passion to be reckoned on” in

Athens, since the Athenians indeed struggled to eschew hopeful intoxication in response

to perceived good luck, even as they managed to control their fear in response to

perceived bad luck.55 In fact, because the Athenians’ kinetic energy on the battlefield is

implicated in the excesses of Athenian imperialism, the Athenians’ appropriately fearful

nonetheless energetic responses to disasters nearer to home may present the most

admirable side of their democratic daring.

53 Thucydides’ language of fear (e.g., deos, phobos, ekplēsis) has been traced and

analyzed by Desmond in “Lessons of Fear,” 359-79. On deos in particular, see Edmunds,

Chance and Intelligence, 59-60, 118-22.

54 On this point, see NE 3.7.1115b8-19, Republic 430b, Laws 647c-649c. Consider, in

addition, Connor, Thucydides, 247.

55 The power of fear in the face of disaster to support political order is arguably one

lesson that Thucydides taught Hobbes; hence my allusion to Hobbes in this line. See

Hobbes, Leviathan, 88: “the passion to be reckoned on is fear. . . .” On Hobbes and

Thucydides, see Ahrensdorf, “Fear of Death,” 579-98.

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The Spartan Objection

Some scholars have contended that Thucydides favors the Spartan civic discourse on the

idea of luck over and against the Athenian altogether. In the view of H.P. Stahl, for

example, whereas Pericles “imagines the course of events to be under the sway of human

reason,” the view of the Spartan King Archidamus “is confirmed by the experience of the

first years of the war”: “‘the fortunes of war cannot be analyzed by the mind

beforehand’” (1.84.3).56 Edmunds writes, in a similar vein, that “clearly Thucydides’

method has closer affinities with the Athenian principle of gnome than with the Spartan

diffidence before tyche. But to some degree what the method discovers is the validity of

the Lacedaemonian principle at least from the point of view of the actors in the history.”57

For these Laconophiles, the deeds of the History confirm that bad luck is worthy of both

the Spartans’ fear and their correspondingly severe education in self-control

(sōphrosunē). As I will argue, however, this interpretation whitewashes the Spartans’

confused account of bad luck, while it exaggerates their self-control.58

56 Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 96.

57 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 147, 183. See also Rahe, “Religion, Politics, and

Piety,” 432; Eidinow, Luck, Fate & Fortune, 128, 137-139.

58 See Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking, 185: “the inflexibility and ignorance

evinced by the Spartans is evidently not the answer” to the problems that beset Athenian

democracy on Thucydides’ representation of it. Also, Balot, Courage in the Democratic

Polis, 207-209; Mara, “Thucydides and Political Thought,” 121.

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The first speech of the Spartan King Archidamus—the most profound apologia

for the Spartan regime found in the History—outlines the characteristic Spartan

perspective on luck. Speaking after the Athenian envoys to Sparta, Archidamus similarly

affirms the unpredictability of war: a war’s “progress is unknowable at the outset” (ouch

huparchei eidenai kath’ hoti chōrēsei; 1.82.6). Notice, however, that Archidamus’

statement is stronger than that of the Athenian envoys (1.78.1-2), and it seems to carry a

radically different implication for action: if the course of war is not merely

“unpredictable,” as the Athenians had suggested, but in fact “unknowable,” then of what

use is the Athenians’ advice, namely, to deliberate before deciding on war? Archidamus

goes on to justify, explicitly yet paradoxically, the misology of the Spartan hoplite.

Because “we can’t work out whose chances (tuchas) in war are better in a speech”

(1.84.3), Archidamus almost denies the usefulness of deliberation altogether. In

Archidamus’ view, the blows of fortune fall so quickly and furiously on the battlefield

that the only adequate foundation for martial virtue, especially courage and self-control,

is Sparta’s austere program of military training (agōgē), which used shame and the threat

of punishment to make a necessity of virtue (1.84.3-4).59 For Archidamus, “the winner

will be the one whose education was most severe” (hostis en tois anankaiotatois

paideuetai; 1.84.4). What distinguishes the Spartan orientation toward the unpredictable

59 See Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 207; Immerwahr, Form and Thought in

Herodotus, 304. Aristotle, Pol. 7.4.1338b11-14: “the Spartans . . . turn out children

resembling beasts by imposing severe exertions, the assumption being that this is the

most advantageous thing with a view to courage.”

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future from the Athenian is, in the first place, that the Spartans “make [their] preparations

in action” rather than through deliberation (1.84.4; cf. 7.67.4).

Yet, precisely because the Spartans view luck as unknowable and deliberation as

futile, their attempts to defeat the Athenians on the battlefield give rise to a comedy of

errors. Recall the first naval battle of the war, which takes place off the coast of Rhium

near the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth.60 The Athenian general Phormio predicts,

correctly, that a morning wind will disrupt the Spartans’ ill-advised circle formation,

allowing the Athenians to perform their typical break-through maneuver (2.84.2). After

the Athenian rout and before the second battle, Phormio delivers a speech to his sailors

that does not mention luck; the initial victory he credits to the experience and technical

skill of the Athenian navy (2.89.3). Thucydides himself shares Phormio’s view,

explaining the Athenian victory in light of “the long experience of the Athenians, in

comparison to the brief training of [the Spartans]” (2.85.2).

The corresponding harangue of the Spartan commanders, however, features the

rhetoric of luck. At the beginning of the speech, the commanders seize on both luck and

inexperience as causes of the Spartan defeat: “most of the luck (tuchēs) went against us

and our inexperience (apeiria) . . . may also have contributed to our failure” (2.87.2). Yet

60 On this episode, see especially the contrasting interpretations of Romilly, Mind of

Thucydides, 80-87, and Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 83-91, which are characteristically

“optimistic” and “pessimistic,” respectively, regarding the ability of human beings in

general and of Athenians in particular to overcome luck. See also Strauss, City and Man,

170.

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they later deny that bad luck or inexperience could excuse what happened. Courageous

Spartans are expected to stand firm, if not to conquer, no matter the odds: “you should

realize that though all men can suffer reverses of fortune (tais men tuchais endechesthai

sphallesthai tous anthrōpous), the courageous in mind always remain true to themselves

(tais de gnōmais tous autous aiei orthōs andreious einai), and as such they would never

offer inexperience as a good excuse for cowardice in any situation. Any lack of

experience is compensated for by your daring” (tolmē; 2.87.3-4). Even as the Spartans

commanders crow about Spartan courage, however, they do not trust it. Hornblower

notes that “although [the speech] begins by asserting that the earlier defeat was due to no

cowardice, it ends by threatening would-be cowards” with punishment (kolasthēsetai;

2.87.9).61 The Spartans understand neither what caused their defeat in the first battle nor

how better to prepare for the second—apart from amassing many more ships at Rhium

and threatening their own forces.62

True, the second battle initially favors the Peloponnesians: they manage to compel

Phormio to engage in the narrows of the Gulf of Corinth, neutralizing Athenian

seamanship and even capturing nine Athenian ships. Yet, the Athenians ultimately

61 Hornblower, Commentary, 367.

62 According to Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 86: “it is exactly their inexperience in

matters of naval warfare . . . which gives the Peloponnesians the courage to make a

second attempt.” What Stahl must mean to say is that the Peloponnesians would have

withdrawn if they had fully understood their inferiority at sea. In fact, their inexperience

undermines their courage in both engagements.

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recovered these ships and seized six belonging to the Peloponnesians (2.90-92). The

turning point of the battle occurred when a fleeing Athenian ship sailed around a

merchant vessel that “happened to be (etuchē) moored in open water” and “rammed the

pursuing Leucadian vessel amidships and sank it” (2.91.3). Thucydides says that “fear

(phobos) fell upon (empiptei) the Spartans at this unexpected and unforeseeable feat”

(genomenou toutou aprosdokētou te kai para logon; 2.91.4). The Athenians then turned

on their fearful and disordered pursuers. Jacqueline de Romilly comments: “So owing to

chance. . . . the superiority or inferiority of the two adversaries, which until then has been

masked by the exceptional circumstances, is quickly apparent once they must adapt to a

change in circumstances.”63 The combination of Spartan fear in the face of ostensible bad

luck and of Athenian daring, judgment, and skill allows the Athenians to hold their own

in spite of a massive numerical disadvantage.

The interplay between Spartan speeches and Spartan deeds at Rhium suggests that

the Spartan account of luck does not make sense for four reasons. First, because the

Spartans do not deliberate before entering into battle, they often encounter situations that

appear unpredictable to them, even when these situations could have been predicted—

such as the wind and the Athenians’ ability to use it to their advantage (2.84.2, 3.16, 4.13-

14, 5.65-66, 8.10). Second, while the Spartans believe that severe training in hoplite

warfare suffices to produce courage and self-control, which will enable them to remain

steadfast in the face of bad luck, the Spartans in fact lack experience of different

circumstances and modes of warfare, especially in comparison to the active, inventive,

63 Romilly, Mind of Thucydides, 83-84.

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and seafaring Athenians—a point emphasized by the Corinthians (1.68.1, 1.70) and by

Thucydides himself (4.55). The ludicrous expectation held by the Spartans prior to

Rhium was that they would hold their own against the Athenian navy; but their lack of

experience contributed to their fear and incompetence in the event (2.85.2). Third, for all

their ostensible respect for the power of luck, the Spartans seem to think that bad luck can

be reduced to shameful cowardice (4.17.2, 7.18.2-3). When the Athenians seized control

of the second battle by ramming the Leucadian ship, the Spartan commander of that ship,

the aptly named Timocrates, immediately killed himself (2.92.3). Fourth and last, the

cumulative effect of Spartan misology, inexperience, and stigmatization of cowardice

renders the Spartans fearful and dejected at the first hint of misfortune, which they tend to

regard as both inexplicable and blameworthy. According to Thucydides, the Spartans

viewed their first defeat at Rhium as “incomprehensible”; at the same time, they reacted

“angrily” to what they perceived to be a “lack of courage” (2.85.2).

Indeed, although the Spartans claim to respect the power of luck and to cultivate

martial virtues such as courage and self-control that will allow them to withstand the

appearance of bad luck, their deeds throughout the war show that they in fact respond to

ostensibly unlucky events with fear, incomprehension, and guilt. After the Athenians

captured both Pylos and Cythera on the Peloponnese, Thucydides reports these “reverses

of fortune, which had been so many, unaccountable, and rapid, shocked the Spartans to

the core, and they were now afraid that some new disaster might strike. . . . They thought

their every move would end in failure” (4.55.3-4). Thucydides later reveals that the

Spartans blamed themselves for these misfortunes because they had begun the war with

Athens in spite of the Athenian offer of arbitration (7.18.2-3). Consider, in addition, the

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ubiquitous hesitation of the Spartan kings, who repeatedly led out armies only to return

home before fighting; in particular, whenever an earthquake occurred, the Spartans fled

(1.101.2 3.89.1, 5.54.1-2, 5.55.4, 5.60.1, 5.65.2, 5.82.3-4, 5.116.1, 6.95.1, 8.6.5, 8.60.2-3,

8.78).64 These examples bring to light the Spartans’ piety—the true source of their fear

and guilt. The Spartans actually view bad luck as symptomatic of the capricious yet just

punishments of jealous gods; hence their obsession with earthquakes, which they regard

as omens.

Of course, the notoriously warlike Spartans were not simply cowardly at every

moment of the twenty-seven-year war. The Spartan general Brasidas characteristically

exhibits courage—for example, during his climactic, fatal charge at Amphipolis.

However, it is commonplace to observe that Brasidas is the most Athenian of the

Spartans: his daring more closely resembles Athenian daring because it is energetic and

guided by deliberation. Thus Brasidas says to his troops at Amphipolis, sounding more

like Alcibiades than Archidamus, that “the best chance of success in war comes from

clearly identifying mistakes on the part of an enemy and . . . exploiting the opportunities

64 The Spartans also passed up two golden opportunities to sail into the Peiraeus. Of the

first episode, which occurred during 429, Thucydides writes: “it easily could have

happened if they had kept their nerve and if a wind had not hampered them” (2.94.1).

Thucydides’ counterfactual judgment of the second episode is more damning still: in 411,

with the Athenians roiled by civic strife and the revolt of Euboea, the Athenians would be

have been compelled to abandon the Ionian and Thracian outposts of the empire the

moment that the Spartans entered the Peiraeus (8.96.4-5).

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of the moment” (5.9.4). In addition, Thucydides says that, in the view of the Hellenes, the

Spartans lived up to their reputation for courage in hoplite warfare in their victory over

Argos at Mantinea (5.75.3). But Thucydides also gives the victory at Mantinea a comic

aspect. In particular, the Spartans were “shaken more so than on any other occasion in

living memory” (5.66.2) when, at Mantinea, they encountered the Argives in the field.

Yet on the prior afternoon the two armies “had come to within a stone’s throw or a

javelin’s cast” before King Agis had decided, abruptly, and for the second time, to retreat

(5.65.2). What had the Spartans expected if not to fight the next day? In both engaging

the Argives and arranging their troops, the Spartan leaders could not have been clumsier.

In sum, it cannot be Thucydides’ position that the Spartan logos on luck corrects

the Athenian. Against the Archidamian view that the influence of bad luck on human

action renders deliberation impossible one can adduce the efficacious deliberation of

Thucydidean statesmen from Themistocles to Hermocrates and the errors arising out of

the Spartans’ own failures to deliberate. In addition, Thucydides exposes the vaunted

self-control of the Spartans; the reality is that the Spartans respond to the appearance of

bad luck with fear, perplexity, and pious self-castigation. Blinkered by their misology and

their piety, the Spartans err not less but more than the Athenians—though their

timorousness makes their errors less calamitous.

Even so, there is one aspect of the Spartan orientation toward bad luck that

Thucydides may admire. The pious Spartans accept that their own errors have brought

about outcomes that they themselves regard as seriously unlucky. For example, when

Sparta suffers its greatest reversal of fortune, the capture of the Spartiates on the island of

Sphacteria, the Spartan envoys to Athens admit that the Spartans themselves contributed

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to the disaster: “we suffered this reverse, not through any lack of power nor through

arrogance (hubrisantes) that comes from some growth in power, but with no change in

our circumstances, our judgment (gnomē) failed us” (4.18.2). This Spartan speech at

Athens, which mentions tuchē more frequently than any other speech in the History

(4.17.4 (2x), 4.17.5, 4.18.1, 4.18.3, 4.18.4 (3x), 4.18.5, 4.20.2), refuses to draw a hard-

and-fast distinction between bad luck and culpable error. The Spartans’ readiness to

accept responsibility for their own bad luck raises important questions—about luck,

agency, and responsibility—that lie at the heart of Thucydides’ own political thought.

Luck, Agency, and Responsibility in Thucydides’ History

Why might Thucydides foreground the idea of luck? As we have seen, Thucydides

attends to the psychological power of the idea of luck—in particular, its power to

provoke intense emotions and therewith deeds. We have also seen that Thucydides

displays the defining virtues and errors of the Athenian and Spartan regimes as they

confront the appearance of either good or bad luck in war. Most importantly, the deeds of

the History confirm the Periclean view that deliberation about the future can limit the

scope of ostensible bad luck. Through deliberation, it is possible both to prepare for

possible contingencies and to fortify daring—even though the putatively deliberative

Athenians rarely embody gnōmē of this (Periclean) type. At the same time, Thucydides

emphasizes the critical importance of daring: especially in Athens, democratic citizens

displayed an incredible if violent propensity for risk-taking in their imperial ventures and

an appropriate fear of the disasters that threatened the city itself.

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On a more philosophical level, however, by foregrounding the idea of luck,

Thucydides reveals the open-endedness of human action and the possibility of agency. To

be sure, for those who conceive of luck as a force or a divine power that externally

influences human action in ways that human beings cannot possibly foresee or control,

the ideas of luck and agency are mutually exclusive. But for Thucydides, Machiavelli,

and Aristotle, who take a more sophisticated and skeptical approach to these questions,

luck is an epistemic phenomenon rather than a cause of motion or change in its own right.

In particular, Thucydides shows that many instances of apparent good or bad luck are

better understood as instances of contingency or indeterminacy that do not preclude but

rather invite human action. He invokes the idea of luck in order to highlight these

moments of contingency, in which a combination of exigent circumstances, uncertainty,

and human agency together alter the course of the war.

A significant turning point of this type is the Athenian victory at Pylos. Connor

has noted that “the Pylos operation marks a major turning point in the Histories. It is the

first sign of the grand reversal in which the war culminates—the Athenians, at the outset

Greece’s major naval power, ultimately lose their fleet; the Spartans, traditionally a land

power, acquire an empire and develop the navy to control it.”65 In fact, since Cornford’s

publication of Thucydides Mythistoricus over a century ago, the Pylos episode has

65 Connor, Thucydides, 111. Indeed, the Athenian triumph at Pylos and the Athenian

disaster in Sicily dovetail as instances of reversal in Thucydides’ narrative (4.65.4,

5.14.1, 7.71.7). Connor points out that the Athenian generals were on the way to Sicily

when they first landed at Pylos. See also Macleod, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” 143.

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remained a critical touchstone for consideration of the idea of luck in the History. On

Cornford’s incisive reading, “Thucydides represented the occupation of Pylos as the

merest stroke of good luck, undertaken with the least possible amount of deliberate

calculation, and furthered at every turn of events by some unforeseen accident.”66 A.W.

Gomme and Tim Rood have taken the opposite view, emphasizing instead the

“brilliance” and “strategic vision” of the Athenians.67 In my view, however, Thucydides’

Pylos narrative vindicates each of these readings while suggesting a third reading that

absorbs and goes beyond them. For Thucydides, the Pylos narrative illuminates the

possibility of human action undertaken in conditions of material constraint and

uncertainty.68

At first glance, the events at Pylos might seem to have been caused by luck

according to the common-sense view of this idea as something strikingly unpredictable

and uncontrollable. For example, according to Thucydides, Demosthenes’ Athenian fleet

initially put into Pylos by luck (kata tuchēn) during a storm (4.3.1; cf. 3.49.3). Yet

Thucydides also reports that Demosthenes had accompanied the Athenian expedition

with permission from the demos to use the fleet in the western Peloponnese precisely

66 Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 74.

67 Gomme, Historical Commentary, 488 n.1; Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and

Explanation, 31.

68 For a similar view, see Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention, 123-24. See also Sears,

“The Topography of the Pylos Campaign,” 157-68; Foster, “Thermopylae and Pylos,”

185-211.

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because he wanted to fortify Pylos (4.3.2). In addition, Thucydides highlights the fire that

one of the Athenian soldiers “happened to set to a small area of woodland, and when a

wind got up this resulted in most of the woods being burnt down before they knew what

was happening” (4.30.2). This fire afforded the Athenians a clear line of sight to the

Spartan soldiers on Sphacteria, setting the stage for the Athenians’ eventual capture of

both the island and the men. One wonders, however, whether Demosthenes had a hand in

setting this fire. Could it be a coincidence that the Aetolians had previously used fire to

expose Demosthenes’ own troops when they had attempted to hide in the woods of

Aetolia (cf. 4.30.1 and 3.98.2)? Indisputably, Thucydides’ Pylos narrative is defined by a

dynamic interplay between the intelligent agency of Demosthenes and the physical

obstacles and uncertainties that condition his action.

This dynamic interplay between agency and contingency sheds light on the

crucial passage in which Thucydides describes the first battle over the fortification at

Pylos: “So in a complete reversal of fortune (es touto te periestē hē tuchē), the Athenians

were repelling the Spartans from land—and Laconian territory at that—which the

Spartans were attacking by sea, while the Spartans were fighting from ships and invading

the Athenians on their own land, which had become enemy territory” (4.12.3).69 Why

69 On this passage, see Macleod, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” 142-43; Hornblower,

Commentary, 166-67. In the more literal translation of Connor, Thucydides, 111: “luck

had turned about.” See Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 129, for his comments on this

verb, periistēmi: it “is used elsewhere of reversals of expectation and of tyche (1.32.4,

76.2, 78.2; 4.12.3) and more often metaphorically, of war, fear, danger, or suspicion

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does Thucydides describe this battle as a reversal of fortune? His commentary focuses on

the unpredictable reversal of roles worked by the action itself (cf. 7.75.7). Who would

have thought that one of the most significant episodes of the war would involve the

Athenians defending by land a remote outpost of the Peloponnese as the Spartans

attempted to unseat them from the sea? One possible answer is Demosthenes: although

Demosthenes could not have envisioned the unfolding of the Pylos conflict from

beginning to end, including the fire on Sphacteria and Cleon’s unlikely assumption of

Nicias’ command (4.27-29), he nevertheless greeted these unpredictable and exigent

circumstances as opportunities rather than as roadblocks.

By dramatizing the possibilities of deliberation and statesmanship within

contingent circumstances, as in his account of Demosthenes at Pylos, Thucydides

accomplishes at least three purposes. First, the centrality of contingency to Thucydidean

historiography vividly displays the task of judgment within a chaotic world of motion and

war. On this point, consider that Aristotle disparages the genre of history as un-

philosophic in the Poetics on the grounds that history traffics in contingent particulars

rather than in universals.70 However, in the Ethics, Aristotle writes that all the intellectual

(3.54.5; 4.10.1, 34.3, 55.1; 5.73.1; 6.61.4; 8.2.4, 15.1) than literally (1.106; 4.4; 5.7; 5.10;

7.83; 8.108).”

70 Aristotle, Poetics 1451a37-1451b18. Cf. Frede, “Necessity, Chance, and ‘What

Happens for the Most Part,’” 205: “it is the possibility of depicting events undisturbed by

accidents that establishes the superiority of tragedy over history and makes it a more

175

virtues must be able to grasp “things particular and ultimate” (peri ta prakta tauta

d’eschata; NE 6.11.1143a33). The phrase “things particular and ultimate” seems to refer

to contingent particulars in the domain of action. With regard to practical wisdom, for

example, Aristotle says that it “is not concerned with universals alone but must also be

acquainted with the particulars: it is bound up with action, and action concerns the

particulars” (NE 6.7.1141b15-17). Thucydidean historiography supplements Aristotle’s

own account of practical intelligence, if it does not exceed it, insofar as Thucydides

attends to judgment in its relation to the contingent particulars that call it forth.

Second, as Edmunds, Connor, and others have argued, Thucydidean

historiography provides the reader with a vicarious experience of action under conditions

of uncertainty, risk, and material constraint. To the extent that the reader inhabits the

perspective of Demosthenes at Pylos, for example, the reader may learn that the Athenian

victory cannot be the result of dumb luck by itself. Thucydides therefore reveals the

possibility of efficacious action guided by deliberative rationality even in the face of

circumstances that many people regard as simply lucky or unlucky. Moreover, to the

extent that the reader inhabits the perspective of an ordinary Athenian during the plague

or after the loss of the Sicilian expedition, not to mention the perspective of a Corcyrean

during stasis, he may realize that judgment demands the help of daring, and even of

appropriate fear amid disaster. Even more than Pericles’ own speeches, then,

philosophical enterprise, because it can depict the universal, i.e. what is not disturbed by

the incalculable vicissitudes of everyday life.”

176

Thucydidean historiography delivers forceful and vivid lessons in the importance of

deliberation, daring, and a salutary regard for contingency.

Third, precisely because actors in the History have agency, they also remain

responsible for their actions. To be sure, Thucydides does not dole out specifically moral

praise or blame. But whereas Athenian speakers in the History argue that human beings

are so bound by various external and internal necessities that they may not be responsible

for what they do altogether, Thucydides himself does not hesitate to assign responsibility

for actions.71 For example, Thucydides assigns responsibility for the rise of the Athenian

empire in large part to Athens’ tributary allies, who fell under the yoke of Athenian

power when they chose to contribute money rather than to assist the Athenians on their

military campaigns: “For this state affairs the allies themselves were responsible” (aitios;

1.99.3).

71 Like the Athenian envoys to Sparta (1.76.1-2) and Melos (5.105.1-2), not to mention

Hermocrates (4.61.5), many scholars maintain that it is natural, compulsory, and hence

excusable for individuals and cities to rule to the greatest extent possible. The only check

on their acquisitiveness would be the Diodotean realization that they are bound to be

overly hopeful. See Strauss, City and Man, 192; Orwin, Humanity, 200-203; Ahrensdorf,

“Thucydides’ Realistic Critique of Realism,” 231-265. Cf. Eckstein, “Thucydides, the

Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War,” 757-77. By contrast, my interpretation has more in

common with Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 25-28; Zumbrunnen,

Silence and Democracy, 66-124; Balot, Greed and Injustice, 156-72.

177

Yet the History brings to light how rare it is for the Athenians in particular to

offer honest accounts of their own deeds, irrespective of whether the action in question

turned out as expected. The Athenians often make excuses for their own serious

misfortunes, while they take credit for the unpredictable results of their deeds and blame

themselves or their fellows for actions that predictably fall short of their hopes. If,

according to the canonical definition of Williams, “the basic experience connected with

shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong

condition,” then, for many of Thucydides’ characters, reading his work, per impossibile,

would make them blush.72 In particular, Thucydides focuses his own gaze and therewith

the gaze of the reader on reversals of fortune that explode self-serving speeches.

For example, Thucydides corrects the Athenian civic-mythology surrounding the

so-called tyrannicides, Aristogeiton and Harmodius.73 This is a well-known set piece

within the History; what has not been fully explained is the role of luck in this narrative.

According to Thucydides, “the daring deed of Aristogeiton and Harmodius was in fact

the lucky result (suntuchia) of a love affair” (6.54.1). Whereas the Athenians celebrated

the tyrannicides as patriotic freedom-fighters who killed the tyrant Hipparchus for the

sake of political freedom, Thucydides casts Aristogeiton and Harmodius as ordinary

72 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 78. See also Saxonhouse, Free Speech, 57-82; Balot,

Courage in the Democratic Polis, 34-39.

73 On this episode, see Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 1-11; Nichols, Thucydides and the

Pursuit of Freedom, 171-74; Connor, Thucydides, 176-80; Meyer, “Thucydides on

Harmodius and Aristogeiton,” 13-34; Wohl, “The Eros of Alcibiades,” 349-85.

178

lovers (6.59.1); their attempt at conspiracy, and the fallout from that attempt, were

contingent consequences of their love affair. In particular, the lovers were offended

because Hipparchus, who was not in fact tyrant but the brother of the tyrant Hippias, had

attempted to seduce Harmodius, and had thereafter insulted Harmodius’ sister in public

(6.54-56.1). Seeking revenge, the lovers conspired to overturn the regime on the day of

the Great Panathenaea (6.56.2). However, when they noticed one of their fellow

conspirators talking to Hippias during the festival, they panicked and fell upon

Hipparchus, killing him alone (6.57.2). For Thucydides, the killing of Hipparchus

precipitated further reversals. It was “the misfortune (dustuchia) of Hipparchus,” for

example, to have his name remembered for tyranny, though he never held it (6.55.4). By

contrast, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were praised to the skies by the democracy, though

they did not actually participate in its founding. In fact, according to Thucydides, the

Peisistratid tyrants had ruled with virtue and intelligence (6.54.5); only after the

attempted coup did Hippias turn violent (6.59.2). The crowning touch is that the Spartans,

not the Athenians, ultimately deposed the Peisistratids, paving the way for the rise of the

democracy (6.59.4; see also 1.18.1).

Thucydides’ account of the tyrannicides denies to the Athenians the credit and the

pride that they falsely claim for the rise of the democracy by reporting the unpredictable,

even haphazard sequence of events that led to this result.74 It also calls into question the

Athenians who later convicted and killed many of their fellow citizens in response to the

74 See also Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 171-72; Shanske,

Philosophical Origins, 75; Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 8.

179

affair of the Herms; for these violent partisans had appealed to the story about the

tyrannicides in order to justify their purge (6.60). For the same reason that he attends to

the causes of the war itself, Thucydides attends to the episode of the tyrannicides: he aims

to uncover the true political causalities masked by false claims and accusations of

responsibility (1.23.6, 1.88). In the case of the tyrannicides, the causal chain is marked by

many unforeseen reversals and contingent occurrences that could not easily have been

predicted and hence cannot from the basis of any justifiable pride in the founding of the

Athenian democracy.

Implicitly, then, Thucydides issues a warning to political actors. While your

fellow citizens may fail to call you to account for your deeds, or while they may celebrate

you for deeds that you yourself did not perform, or while they may be punished for

misfortunes in which you yourself had a hand, it remains open to the historian-critic to

show, precisely, the truth about your actions. Precision (akribeia; 1.22.2) in just this

sense is the hallmark of the History. Thucydides models self-critical honesty about the

past, illuminating reversals of fortune that have been mendaciously excused,

mythologized, or punished. Along with daring and deliberation, then, Thucydides’ own

self-critical honesty is a virtue suited a to a world of contingency.

180

CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF LUCK

Thucydides’ self-critical honesty about the past raises the question of his relation to

democratic Athens. As Sara Monoson, Josiah Ober, and Arlene Saxonhouse have shown,

honesty or frank speech (parrhēsia) was a hallmark of the Athenian democracy: all

citizens of democratic Athens enjoyed the privilege of political speech in the Assembly

(isēgoria) in addition to broader freedoms of thought and expression.1 In Euripides’

Hippolytus, for example, Phaedra hopes that her children will be able to “live flourishing,

as men free to speak frankly/freely (eleutheroi parrhēsia) in the famous city of the

Athenians” (420-23).2 Thucydides’ critical account of democratic Athens shows that he

was “entangled” in the civic discourses of the democracy, including its discourse on frank

speech. But does his critical political history also provide resources for theorizing

democratic citizenship? In particular, is it possible to find in Thucydides a democratic

politics of luck that improves upon the Periclean-Athenian version?

On the one hand, the answer to this question is “no.” Although Thucydides’

Pericles offers his panegyric of Athenian political life, Thucydides himself eschews

utopian thought. Through my readings of both Thucydides and Machiavelli, I have

argued that the idea of luck gives rise to powerful emotions such as hope and fear; these

emotions are not easily controlled, especially in political life. The idea of luck often

1 Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements, 51-56; Ober, Mass and Elite, 296;

Saxonhouse, Free Speech; Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 52-63; Nehemas, Art

of Living, 164.

2 Euripides, Hippolytus 420-23 (trans. Saxonhouse). See Saxonhouse, Free Speech, 131.

181

figures into political life as a delusion—or as a rhetorical topos used by political leaders

to manipulate the emotions of ordinary people. Thucydides does not make the quixotic

error of contemporary luck egalitarians: whereas they aim to neutralize the effects of luck

on the lives of democratic citizens, he doubts that democratic citizens can fully control

their own emotional responses to apparent good or bad luck. At bottom, the problem of

luck lies in the ethical beliefs, psychological orientations, and habits belonging to

democratic citizens themselves.

On the other hand, and as we have seen, Thucydides offers resources for

theorizing virtues of democratic leaders and citizens who think and act well in the face of

contingency—even if he himself does not spell out a “democratic theory.” In the first

place, Thucydides shows that luck loves judgment, and judgment luck.3 The apparently

unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances of war demand the exercise of Periclean

deliberative rationality because this virtue empowers leaders and citizens to confront the

unknown future. In fact, Thucydides goes beyond Aristotle by depicting the deliberative

contexts in which gnōmē is either expressed or thwarted in democratic Athens.

Thucydides also displays the particular successes and failures of judgments made in

response to lucky or unlucky circumstances or outcomes through his vividly detailed

narratives and his speech-deed pairings. Thus Thucydides’ artful incorporation of

contingency into his historiography makes it possible for the reader to hone his gnōmē,

which should not seek to conquer tuchē so much as it should seek to be responsive to it.

3 Here I modify Agathon’s quip (quoted by Aristotle), that “luck loves art, and art luck.”

See NE 6.4.1140a20 and Chapter 2 above.

182

Perhaps this is one respect in which Thucydides meant for the History to be both “useful”

(ōphelima) and “a possession for all time” (ktēma es aei; 1.22.4).

Thucydides also provides an education in daring or in appropriate fear that could

be useful to democratic citizens and to theorists of democracy alike. As we have seen,

Thucydides attends to the daring of ordinary Athenian citizens in the face of disaster,

including both their incredible if ambiguous energy on the battlefield and their more self-

restrained fear amid disasters at home. To this extent Thucydides corrects Pericles’ own

hesitation to rely on the daring of ordinary citizens, and he suggests a qualified defense of

Athenian democracy as the regime that best harnesses the daring of ordinary people,

especially in unlucky circumstances.

In fact, on the topic of appropriate fear, consider that Thucydides’ History has an

affinity with Bernard Williams’s work on Greek tragedy—and with the cathartic function

of the Theater of Dionysus itself.4 Williams returns to Greek tragedy because he thinks

that tragedy can help us to confront certain harsh truths through depictions of events that

might otherwise crush us. Referring to a passage from Nietzsche’s Nachlass, Williams

writes: “When later he [Nietzsche] said that we have art [in particular, tragedy] so that we

4 As I continue to examine the role of luck within the civic discourses of Athenian

democracy, I will undoubtedly turn to tragedy. Not only Pericles but also the demos

reflected on questions of luck, virtue, error, and the gods; and the people primarily

performed these self-examinations in the theater. See Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia,” 58-

76; Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, esp. 24; Balot, Courage in the

Democratic Polis, 279; Zeitlin, “Theater of Self and Society,” 101-141.

183

do not perish from the truth, he did not mean that we use art in order to escape from the

truth: he meant that we have art so that we can both grasp the truth and not perish from

it.”5 Whether Williams’s Nietzschean and highly cognitive view of tragedy passes

muster—Aristotle, in his theory of tragedy, seizes instead on its power to provoke pity

and fear6—Thucydides’ History indeed instills appropriate fear of disaster, wrongdoing,

and reversal. To this extent the History could perform the function of the “fear drug”

imagined by Plato’s Athenian Stranger—a kind of anti-wine that makes citizens

intoxicated with appropriate fear, including fear of their own transgressions and

shamelessness.7 Contra Machiavelli, it may not be necessary to have been abandoned as

an infant in order to learn self-possession. As I suggested in Chapter 1, Thucydides is a

political-phenomenologist of luck, not least because he narrates the experience of

extreme bad luck in political life—for example, in his account of the plague.

Of course, the mention of Machiavelli reminds us that the appropriateness of

appropriate fear hinges on its directedness toward justice and human flourishing.

Obviously, political leaders such as Thucydides’ Alcibiades and Machiavelli’s Camillus

did not have such ends in mind; these leaders used the rhetoric of luck to foment daring

for the purpose of imperial domination. Thucydides’ own self-critical honesty about the

past provides a salient counterpoint to the highly rhetorical speeches of these aggressive

and self-interested leaders. Although Pericles had said, paradoxically if not ironically,

5 Williams, “Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” 51. See also Beiner, Political Judgment, 119.

6 Aristotle, Poetics 1449b.

7 See Plato, Laws 647c-49d.

184

that “we [Athenians] do not need Homer, or anyone else, to praise our power” (2.41.4),

because in Pericles’ view Athenian deeds had produced a more concrete and lasting

legacy in the form of the empire, the History shows that the Athenian democracy and

every city could use a Thucydides, a critical historian who speaks the truth about its past.

To the extent that democratic citizens remain readers of Thucydides today, then he can

help them to develop self-critical honesty about their own politics. In other words,

Thucydides can show us more precisely what Aristotle might have meant when he

suggested that political leaders and citizens should be serious and that they should take

responsibility for their deeds.

In these ways, democratic citizens can learn from the gnōmē of Thucydides’

Pericles (not to mention his Themistocles, Demosthenes, and Hermocrates), the daring

and appropriate fear of his ordinary Athenians, and the critical historiography of

Thucydides himself. If democratic citizens were to cultivate these virtues, then they

might become more honest than the Athenians about the limits of the power of the demos

at home and abroad; soberer about the vulnerability of the city to disaster; less inclined to

punish political leaders as scapegoats for bad luck; and equally strong, if not stronger,

when the city is weighed down by serious misfortune. To be sure, such democratic

citizens would not thereby “conquer” luck, which does not even exist as something out

there to be conquered. But would they not eschew intoxication in good luck or abjectness

in bad luck? To that extent, they would deserve our respect—and our wonder.

185

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