Marriage and Society in Livy’s “History” and Machiavelli’s “Mandragola”

• In Event: The Spectacle of Privilege in Machiavelli’s "Mandragola"

Abstract

This paper looks at how Machiavelli’s “Mandragola” reworks Roman narratives about love, sex, and marriage in an effort to challenge embedded arguments about social and political organization. The most obvious and frequently discussed allusion to Roman history in "Mandragola" is the rape of Lucretia. My paper will discuss this event only briefly, focusing instead on Livy’s discussion of the rape of the Sabine women. Livy presents the Roman value "concordia" as having its beginning in the tense negotiations that followed the rape and forced marriage of the Sabines, recounted in Book 1 of his “History of Rome.” My paper unearths the many implicit references to this story in Machiavelli’s “Mandragola” and shows how they register Machiavelli’s skepticism about "concordia" as a political ideal.

Author

• Michelle Tolman Clarke, Dartmouth College