5 - Princeps, rex, imperator

Summary

The Senecan ideology was hardly the only means by which the Renaissance monarch articulated his claims to embody the person and authority of the princeps. In addition to an array of legal arguments, an impressive mobilisation of ideological resources drawn from a considerable range of Roman imperial texts and monuments can be observed in the formation of the princely person and in the description of his principatus. And during the Quattrocento, elements of Platonic political theory were also steadily introduced into humanist discourse on the prince, grafted onto a pre-existing tradition of considerable longevity. But there was a limit to the extent to which Platonic ideals could transform either the content or the character of a mode of political reflection within a culture so fervently committed to the articulation of its thinking in Roman rhetorical style, and so indebted already for a great deal of its basic conceptual structure to a markedly Roman literature on the ideals of monarchical rule. From Petrarch to Erasmus, humanist mirrors generally spend little time introducing the prince to Plato's theory of forms.

Notwithstanding the multiplicity of classical texts and genres upon which humanists drew in princely discourse, one can discern a coherent and fairly continuous conceptual basis underpinning their account of the virtuous prince. That structure is traceable to a remarkable extent to the one classical speculum with which almost every writer on monarchy was highly familiar: De clementia.