Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book I: “The Origin of All Things.” Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.
The Florentine diplomat Brunetto Latini spent his life entirely within the thirteenth century. A Guelph not a Ghibelline (Dante didn’t save a place for him in Paradise), he fled to Paris for seven years in the 1260s after his party was defeated, returning and eventually serving briefly as Chancellor of his city. He wrote The Book of the Treasure during those years of exile to provide a compendium of theoretical and practical wisdom for the edification of a young aspirant to political office in Florence. The Book was popular for decades, its authority eclipsed only by the ‘new science’ of the Renaissance. As an encyclopedia before the modern encyclopedias, it provides a look at what learned men knew before the criteria for useful knowledge were changed for the sake of ‘modernity.’ “I do not say that the book is based on my own wisdom which is indeed meager, but rather it is like a honeycomb collected from different flowers, for this book is compiled exclusively from, the marvelous sayings of the authors who before our time have dealt with philosophy, each one in accordance with his own particular knowledge, for no earthly man can know everything.”
“This book is called the Treasure,” he begins, “for just as the lord who wishes to mass things of great value, not only for his own pleasure but to increase his power and elevate his social status in war and in peace puts into his treasure the most precious jewels he can gather together according to his intention, in a similar manner the body of this book is compiled out of wisdom, like the one which is extracted from all branches of philosophy in a brief summary.” He divides it into the three parts of philosophy, addressing theory, and the two practical topics of ethics and logic respectively. He compares theory to “cash money; no mind without it can invest in practical wisdom or rational thought.” He compares ethical wisdom to “precious stones” that give “delight and worth” to a man by showing him “the things one should do and not do,” along with “the reasons why” one should or should not do those things. He compares logic to “fine gold,” a metal that “surpasses all metals.” The science of logic includes both rhetoric or “the science of speaking well” and politics or the science of “governing a people more noble than any other in the world”—namely, the Florentines. That is, Latini’s advice is not only regime-specific but city-specific; he does not ignore other regimes and other cities, introducing them for purposes of illustration, but he has his own city and his own immediate reader in mind. “I give it to you, handsome gentle friend, for you are indeed worthy of it in my judgment.” Anticipating the movement away from books written in Latin to books written in the vernacular, he writes in French; “even though we are Italian,” French is “more pleasant and has more in common with all other languages.” Not incidentally, it was also the language of diplomacy. He writes to give his reader something might actually read and use, not to impress scholars.
“Philosophy is the root from which grows all of the knowledge man man can have.” It is “the true inquiry into things, natural, divine, and human, insofar as man is capable of understanding.” Theory, knowledge of “the nature of all things celestial and terrestrial,” ranges from “things without corporeal existence and unrelated to corporeal things” (the topic of theology) to things with corporeal existence as they relate relate to other corporeal things (the topic of physics), and finally to incorporeal things and their relations with corporeal things (the topic of mathematics, which includes arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy).
Ethics, the second branch of philosophy and the first of the two practical branches, consists of three parts: self-government, household governance or economics, and politics (“govern[ing] peoples or kingdoms or a city, in war or in peace”). Politics is “the highest wisdom and most noble profession there is among men,” requiring knowledge of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (“that noble science which teaches us to compose and organize and say good and beautiful words, full of meaning, in keeping with the nature of the utterance,” as seen first and foremost in Holy Scripture and as taught best by Cicero). Here, Latini reclassifies politics under ethics.
Logic, the third branch of philosophy and the second of the two practical branches, means the discipline “which teaches how to prove and demonstrate why one should do some things and not others.” It does so in three ways: by dialectic, by demonstration, and by sophistry. Dialectic teaches “how to debate and contend and dispute” with other people; demonstration teaches how “to prove that the words we have said are true and that the thing is as we say, with good reasons and true arguments”; sophistry teaches to prove what we say is true “through bad tricks and false reasons and by sophisms, that is, by arguments which have the appearance and outward cover of truth but contain only falsehood.” An honest man will need to know those techniques, not to use them but to recognize and counteract them.
The First Book addresses theory and begins at the Beginning, with what “sages say”: that God “made and created the world and all other things” in four ways. First, He imagined the “World Archetype” or “semblance of the world”; then, “out of nothing,” he made a “great mass of matter,” the “hyle,” with “no figure and no shape”; he then made the particular things themselves, also out of nothing, “heaven and earth and water, day and light and angels,” separating the light from darkness. Human souls were made out of nothing, as well. Finally, he “ordained the nature of all things individually, and gave the way in which they should be born and die, and the strength and characteristics and nature of each one.” Although “each thing is subject to its nature,” nature is subject to God, who “can adjust and change the course” of the nature of each thing “by divine miracle.” He does so, when he so chooses, over time, ‘providentially,’ but since God “knows all things past and present and future,” “everything he has made is to him as if present.” Time concerns those creatures below heaven, not those above it: “Before the beginning of the world there was no time.” God’s creation was “in his mind eternally,” His will being “eternal and changeless.” Evil arose from beings which diverted from His will, as “there is nothing bad by nature,” only things (including ourselves) which are badly used.
God “allows bad things to happen…so that the goodness of good nature should be known by its opposite, for two opposite things, when they are together side by side, show up better.” Men do evil either in thought (iniquity) or in deed (sin). Evil in thought has three types: temptation, pleasure, and consent. Evil in deed also has three types: in words, in deeds, or in perseverance. Latini at first maintains that Lucifer’s evil met with no divine forgiveness because, in his pride, he never repented, whereas Adam was forgiven because he did repent, “recogniz[ing] that he was the subject of God.” But Latini immediately revises this account. “I say to you that Man was forgiven because the weakness of sin in him is in his body, which is made of mud and wet earth, and the angels sinned, and they were not afflicted with any carnal malady.” This is a Platonizing claim, not a Biblical teaching; Latini occasionally places such contradictions in his book, perhaps as a test of his reader’s mind. Thus “the soul has many fine qualities by nature, but these are obscured by the union with the body, which is corruptible.”
As for the nature of Man, he was made in the image of God whereas Woman was made in the image of Man, which accounts for the fact that “Women are subject to men by law of nature.” Among all the things under heaven, only “Man was made for himself,” Woman “made to help him.” Insofar as he sins, contradicting the nature God gave him, Man “was turned over to the Devil,” who, in the form of the serpent, was commanded to “eat the earth, that is to say, bad men.” Although made in God’s image, Man’s soul “is not made of divine substance or of divine nature.” God is not immanent in Man, whose soul is “created at the very moment when it enters the body.” Reason or “accurate judgment” is the quality of the soul that distinguishes human beings from animals, but the soul “has many roles”—giving life to the human body, desiring things (the will), inspiring (spirit), sensing (sensitivity), and having knowledge (understanding). “Understanding is the highest quality of the soul, through which we receive reason and knowledge, and because of which man is called the image of God, and reason is a movement of the soul which heightens the awareness of understanding and separates truth from falsehood.” At this point, Latini leaves “understanding” undefined, although it may be what Plato calls noēsis. In terms of the body, the head is “the dwelling place of the soul” and it has three “cells”—one in the front of the head for learning, one in the middle of the head for recognizing, the third in the back of the head for remembering. If future, present, and past are united in God, they are separate but related in the soul of Man; further, futurity in Man’s soul comes into being through learning, but God is all-knowing. Memory, registering the past, is “the treasure chest of all things and guardian of everything that one discovers through ingenuity or learns through others.” This treasure-book, then, consists primarily of things remembered, set down, however, for learning and recognizing. Beasts remember, too, but they do not reason, “follow[ing] only their will, without any regard for reason.”
Given Man’s departure from nature into sin, divine and human law needed to be established. Initially, only the Hebrews had divine law; all other sets of laws were invented by human lawgivers, although Mercury, who gave laws to the Egyptians, was called divine. “Divine law is by nature,” by which Latini probably means that nature is its conduit, through human beings. God’s law as delivered by Moses differs from God’s law delivered by Jesus Christ and His disciples because “God in his great foresight gave to each era what was appropriate,” fitting His law to prevailing human circumstances in both instances. The law delivered by Christ is stricter than the law delivered by Moses because Christ Himself, the embodiment of the truth, delivered it, showing men the truth in His Person and thus giving them fewer excuses not to know the truth. This notwithstanding, kings and lords were established and maintained because “commanding or establishing law is of little value among men unless there is someone who can make them obey the law, in order to promote justice and punish wrong.” Rulers enforce the divine law, seen in human nature insofar as it is not misused for iniquity or for sin.
This begins a lengthy digression on the course of human events, whereby the nature of Man and his evil thoughts and deeds played out in a succession of rulers, eventually mitigated by the Catholic empire. The first two kingdoms on earth “which in rank and lordship and power and nobility surpassed all the others” were those of the Assyrians and the Romans, one from the east and the other from the west. “Both ruled the entire world” in their time. Alongside this succession of monarchic empires there have been six “ages of the world” in Biblical terms: from Adam to Noah, culminating in God’s destruction of the surface of the world; from Noah to Abraham, culminating in the founding of the Israelite nation; from Abraham to David, the apex of Israel; from David to “the time of the Pharaohs, when God destroyed Jerusalem and held the Jews captive” in Babylon; from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth of Jesus Christ; and finally the current age, which will last from the birth of Christ to the end of the world. Drawing from the Old Testament, Latini summarizes the principal events of each age. The greatest Assyrian king, Ninus, “was the first man to assemble an army for war,” becoming the “head of the first kings,” ruling “all of Asia except India.” The worst of all the kings in the Assyrian empire (Babylonia “is included in the Egyptian and Assyrian” kingdoms, according to Latini) was Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Jerusalem, seized the Israelites, and “committed many other perverse actions in his time.”
The Roman empire began in the time of King David, when Aeneas, fleeing ruined Troy, entered Italy with his people and met King Latinus, at first cordially but eventually in battle. Romulus and Remus were his progeny, born of the daughter of Latinus’ daughter, Lavinia. Latini disparages the story that the brothers were abandoned and raised by a she-wolf. They were indeed thrown into a river, but they were discovered by a prostitute; “such women are called lues in Latin,” which Latini, in his rather imaginative etymology, associates with lupus, the Latin word for wolf. Be this as it may, “Romulus was very proud and of great courage,” gathering a cohort around him, warring with local tribal chiefs, and founding Rome 313 years after the destruction of Troy. Jesus was born in the Roman Empire, when it was at its apex; the name of his mother, Mary, means star of the sea “and lady, and brightness, and light”—all very much in contrast with the she-wolf stepmother of the founder of Rome. The empire of war thus began to be replaced by the empire of the Prince of Peace. His designated the apostle Peter as “his vicar, on the earth in his place, and he gave him the power to bind and to unbind on earth all people”—that is, to bring them into Jesus’ Assembly or Church and to expel them from it. Peter preached “the New Law of Jesus Christ” in Rome, “and there he was master and bishop of all the Christians for 25 years and seven months and eight days, until the time of Nero, who was then emperor in Rome, and who was their most cruel and evil lord ever, of all who came before or after him,” the tyrant who had Peter crucified and Paul decapitated. From time to time, after that, the emperors of old Rome occasionally made their peace with the new Rome, one of them “aveng[ing] the death of Our Lord,” which had been urged by Jewish priests, 42 years after Jesus’ death, by destroying Jerusalem and “caus[ing] great harm to the Jews.”
After the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, he ended persecution of Christians, “endowed Holy Church and gave it all the imperial dignity you see.” Nonetheless, schisms within the Roman Church caused “many an emperor and many a king of Lombardy” to be “corrupted by wrong belief.” Two centuries elapsed before the emperor Justinian, “a very wise and astute man,” in collaboration with Pope Agapetus, consolidated imperial law in a way in which “the Christian law was confirmed and the false belief of the heretics condemned.” “Thenceforward, the strength of the Holy Church grew near and far, on this side of the [Mediterranean] sea and the other,” as the new Rome acquired a spiritual and political empire similar to the empire of the old Rome. The eastern part of the new Roman Empire was ruined by the forces of “the evil preacher Mohammed,” who led its inhabitants “away from the good faith and into error.”
In the west, the new Rome was threatened by the Emperor Leo. Pope Stephen’s excommunication of Leo didn’t diminish his military power, however, and when the pope “saw that he could not withstand” Leo and his ally, the king of the Lombards, “he went to France to Pepin the good,” consecrating him and his sons “to always be kings of France.” With that alliance in hand, he defeated Lombardy, ensuring the safety of the Church, but the new Lombard King and the son of Leo revived their fortunes, threatened the Church again, prompting the new pope, Hadrian, to enlist the aid of Pepin’s son, Charlemagne, whose military prowess made him master of both enemies of the Church. Entering Rome “in great triumph,” he was “crowned Emperor of the Romans, and he held the dignity of the empire for his whole life,” additionally subjecting Germany and Spain to his rule and defeating many other enemies of the Church, including Muslim forces before his death in 814. After that, the French kings became weaker, eventually returning “the dignity of the empire” to the Italians. As a result, the western empire split in two, one in Italy, the other in Germany.
The Italians called upon the German king, Otto of Saxony, to defeat an old enemy, now renewed in power. The Lombards, ruled by Berengar (“an evil tyrant and cruel to God and to the world”) and his son Albert [a.k.a. Adelbert] (“who did all the evil that he could”) collaborated with Albert’s brother John, the pope, to become “masters and lords of both Holy Church and the world,” causing “an increase of evil upon evil and cruelty upon cruelty.” Otto eventually defeated the Lombards and was crowned king and emperor of Rome in 955. What became known as the Holy Roman Empire was subsequently ruled by a succession of German kings elected by German princes and archbishops. [1]
These included Frederick II, who “had a heart greater than all other men’s,” a “wise and articulate man,” “very learned,” especially in languages. “His heart’s only desire was to be lord of the world,” and his imperial rule began in 1220. He took full advantage of it: “Even though he had several wives and children in lawful marriage, nevertheless he took delight in the noble women of his kingdom, with the result that he had sons and daughters in abundance.” He expected to continue his rule with the assistance of his sons, “but we think one thing, and God thinks a completely different thing, for when he wants to trouble someone, he takes away his vision first of all, that is, his sense and his good foresight.” Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick for failing to carry out a promised crusade in the Holy Land. Frederick didn’t take that well, “turn[ing] against Holy Church and against the right,” causing “great harm and persecution to the pope and to all his clerics,” laying siege to Rome. The pope’s speech to the people of Rome turned them against Frederick, who withdrew his army to a more secure location but effectively making the pope a prisoner within the Vatican, where he died, years later. A later pope, Innocent IV, escaped and fled to Lyon, “a location where he did not fear the emperor or his power,” from which vantage “he assembled all the general council” of the Church “and proclaimed a perpetual sentence” against the emperor and his men, “deposing him from the empire and all his high possessions” in spirit if not in flesh. “What more could I say? No one could find words to say or put down in writing the evils and the wars which lasted for a long time between the emperor and Holy Church, between him and the Lombards who defended the Holy Church.”
After one of Frederick’s sons, Manfred, suffocated him and poisoned a rival son, Manfred himself died in battle with the papal forces. Eventually, the whole line of Fredrick II was exterminated. “But now the narrative will cease telling of this, and it will return to its subject matter, from which it has gone astray.”
Indeed, why has Latini inserted this digression of human history? It follows from his account of the way in which men corrupt their good nature by iniquity and sin. He needs to show the young gentleman not only what nature is, but what corruption is, lest the youth remain naïve, on the one extreme, or disillusioned on the other. If God allows evil to exist in order to highlight the goodness of the good, beginning with Himself and His creation, Latini illustrates this lesson by first describing the goodness of nature and then showing the consequences of its corruption in the hearts and hands of men. He shows that both emperors and popes can sink into evil or rise to good works, that they can choose either way but frequently choose the wrong way.
Having described the purposes of God working through nature and sometimes overriding it, Latini turns to analysis of the parts of nature, its material causes. He names the four elements—fire, water, air, earth—and their corresponding “complexions”—hot and dry, cold and wet, hot and moist, cold and dry—seasons—summer, winter, spring, autumn—and blood types—choler, phlegm, “good nature” or sanguine, melancholy. It is noteworthy that good nature corresponds to air, the closest material element to the spirit, hot and moist, the climate of Italy, and spring, the season of rebirth. There are also four corresponding “forces” that sustain animal life: appetite (fire), expulsive (water), digestive (air), and retentive (earth).”It is the function of nature to harmonize discordant matters and make unequal things equal in such a way that all diversity returns to unity, and it adjusts them and assembles them in one body and substance or into something else which is continually reborn in the world,” either by seeds or by birth. “Nature is to God as a hammer is to a blacksmith, who at one time forms a spear, at another a helmet, or a nail, or a needle, or one thing or another according to what the blacksmith wishes.” The behavior of God’s creatures, owing to their lightness or heaviness, quickness or slowness, depends “upon the mixture of the elements in them.”
All of these elements change, coming into being and passing away. There is a fifth element, “distinct from the others,” one “so noble that it cannot be changed or corrupted.” This is “ether” and it comprises “a round heaven which surrounds and encloses within itself all the other elements and the other things which do not partake of divinity; and it is to the world as the shell is to the egg.” If the bodies and the elements ether protects were themselves made of ether, they would need no such protection; Aristotle teaches that “if nature had formed his body of this element…he would be guaranteed against death.” The world, then, is round, the shape most “suited for movement,” as seen in the perpetual cycling of “heaven and firmament.” “If it happened that the world had a long or square shape, it could not be completely full”; there would be corners or pockets where no substance would collect or, perhaps, where too much substance would collect, congeal, and close off that space from motion. Within the world as a whole, the earth is also round. Not knowing about gravity, Latini follows Aristotelian physics in locating the earth in the middle of the universe, contending that its greater density makes it heavier; being made of earth, the heaviest element, the earth “draw[s] itself to the middle and the center of the surrounding ones, that is, to a place from which it can neither go up nor down, nor move from side to side.” This is also why the second-heaviest element, water, clings to the surface of the earth. The lightest element, fire, composes “a very beautiful and radiant sky of he color of crystal,” which exists above the firmament. “It is from this place that the bad angels fell.” Above it, “there is still another sky,” colored purple—the empyrean, which is “of such great light and such great splendor that human understanding is incapable of knowing even the smallest thing about it, and in this heaven is the highest glorious majesty of God,” along with “His angels and His secrets,” which Latini discreetly leaves to “masters in divinity and to the lords of Holy Church” to describe. That is, philosophic noēsis takes one only so far. The rest is left to divine revelation, the province of theologians and priests.
In the firmament, one sees the planets and stars, whose movements can be measured and predicted mathematically because they move in the “pure air”—air devoid of dust and water—the element nearest to the pure abstraction mathematics describes. There are seven planets and 1,200 stars in the firmament. Each planet exerts a moral influence on human beings: Saturn “is cruel and evil and of a cold nature”; Jupiter “mild and merciful and filled with goodness”; Mars warlike; centrally, the Sun reigns as king of all planets thanks to its “great light” and “the good it does”; Venus is “beautiful and kind”; Mercury is small and easily influenced by whatever planet orbits nearest to it; and the Moon is changeable. In its daily revolutions around the earth, the Sun balances light and darkness on the Earth; it is the planet that maintains balance on Earth. The Moon, much smaller than the Sun but closer, “affects the things which are here below more clearly than the others,” decreasing “all things” on Earth when it wanes, increasing them when it waxes. Similarly, the stars exert their influence from their positions among the twelve regions of the Zodiac. Both planets and stars “have such great power over terrestrial things that they have to come and go according to their course”; “to tell the truth, if the firmament did not always turn around the earth as it does, there is no creature in the world which could move for anything in the world,” and “if the firmament ceased turning one instant, all thing would be destroyed and annihilated.” “For this reason we must love and fear Our Lord God, who is Lord of all this, without whom no good and no power can exist,” as “nature is that through which all things move or rest by themselves” and God not only created nature but wields the power to bring it to an end.
Turning his attention to the nature of Earth itself, Latini describes it as “girded and surrounded by the sea,” with three parts (Asia, Africa, Europe). Latini of course knows nothing of the Americas, and regarding Asia he knows about India but not China. He leaves philosophic room for such discoveries, however, although always within certain limits. “You should know, good people, that Our Lord God created many marvels on land and sea that we cannot know clearly because he reserved them for Himself.” The pope rightly “teaches us in this way to understand what he says: do not try to know more than you need to know, but rather strive to know soberly, which is neither too much nor too little”—far from foolish advice for a young gentleman, and even for a young philosopher in the sense that “those who said that the world had a soul did not learn sobriety, but they went beyond it, which is excess.” Indeed, “the wise men of old said many beautiful things about the world and truth, and they said many things which do not show the truth because they were incapable of knowing it, for it remained in our Lord, and it always remains in Him.” It is easy to go “astray through misunderstanding the true knowledge of Jesus Christ and his apostles, in whom we must firmly believe, more than all the other wise men who live or who will ever live.” While leaving room for the increase of human knowledge, Latini carefully limits it to the things which do not contradict Scripture.
Staying within those capacious limits, then, Latini discusses how to choose land for cultivation (avoid excesses of heat and cold, dampness and dryness) and how to build a house on the land (first of all taking care “to know the nature of the water” you will use, then positioning each room in the house facing or facing away from the sun, depending on the room’s intended use). Houses should be built not only in accordance with surrounding nature but in accordance with the way of life of the political regime and the state that prevails in the country. Since the Italians “often quarrel among themselves,” they prudently “take pleasure in making towers and other stone houses,” whereas the more peaceful French “build large and luxurious houses, painted, with large rooms to give pleasure and delight without war and without disturbance.” Wealth counts, too: “The lord should have a large mastiff for the protection of his house, and hunting dogs and hounds and birds for hunting when he wants to enjoy himself by doing these things.” The head of the household must manage it, in his oikonomia seeing to it that “those who work in the household be well instructed and directed as to what they have to do, such that each one has his duties inside and out, in such a way that the lord is sovereign and master of all.”
Having once again digressed into human things, albeit human things as prudently governed within nature, Latini next devotes 69 sections to the description of animals, moving from water creatures to those that crawl on the earth, to those that fly in the air, and finally to those which walk on the earth, which are closest in this aspect of their nature to Man. In this compendium of bookish knowledge, Latini here depends heavily on the recorded observations and claims of other writers. He begins with the fish, which, following Pliny, he classifies as any of the 164 kinds of creatures which live primarily in water, including whales and dolphins. He rules out one purported species of fish as fake. The sirens described by Homer were only “three prostitutes who tricked all passers-by and brought them to ruin,” associated with water “because lust is made of moisture.” They are figments of the imagination of waterlogged sailors.
He does accept the existence of a number of other dubious creatures, however, including a white serpent called a siren, an animal so poisonous that “if it bites a man, he will die before feeling the pain.” Regarding land animals, he is convinced of the existence of basilisks (“the king of the serpents,” whose mere gaze will kill, according to chroniclers of conquering Alexander), dragons (the largest serpent of all,” a denizen of India and Ethiopia, where the summer lasts forever”), and unicorns (“a fierce animal” with a body resembling a horse, feet like an element and the tail of a deer, whose “voice is tremendously scary,” an animal “so tough and so wild that no one can overtake it or capture it with any snare in the world”).
Animals that move in the air include the eagle, the peacock, and the vulture. “The eagle sees better than any bird in the world, and it flies so high that it is lot to the sight of man, but it sees so clearly that it distinguishes even the smallest creatures on earth and the fish in the water, and it takes them a it swoops down.” Despite its acuity of vision, it can look “at the rays of the sun, and its eyes do not flinch”; so much so that it tests its hatchlings by holding them up to the sun, discarding those which look away in the “just judgment” that they cannot be eagles. He repeats the legend (“many say”) that the eagle renews its own life by flying so close to the sun “that its feathers burn, along with the darkness in its eyes, and then it lets itself fall into a spring of water and bathes itself three times, and right away it recovers the youth it had previously.” The peacock, ” a simple bird of great beauty, with a serpentine head and a devil’s voice,” “takes delight in its tail because it is so beautiful.” “But nature has given it an ugly thing to do, for when it sees men admiring its beauty, it raises its tail up to have people’s praise and reveals its ugly backside, and shows it to them in vile fashion.” If the eagle is a creature that sees, the peacock one to be seen—the one teaching a lesson in justice, the other a lesson in the way beauty can mix with vileness— the vulture is the bird that smells. It “can smell things from further away than any animal in the world; even from across the sea it can smell carrion.” It therefore “follows men’s armies where there will be an abundance of carrion, and thus they can predict that in that army there will be much killing of men or animals.” Although they feed off the dead, they themselves live long, usually not “less than 100 years or more.”
Among the creatures that fly, honeybees exhibit not only industry but good government. Although Latini in one respect confuses them with flies, claiming that they are “born from the decaying carcass of a cow,” he admires their production of honey and the “extreme ingeniousness” with which they build their “houses,” with “different levels, where each one has its proper place to which it returns every day.” Their regime is a monarchy; their “king” is elected, “not randomly” (that is, by what Aristotle calls the most democratic method, a lottery), “in which there enters more luck than good judgement,” but by selecting “the one to whom nature has given a sign of nobility, who is larger and better looking and of better life.” This notwithstanding, the king bee is no tyrant but rather “more humble and of greater pity” than the others, whom he leaves “free and independent.” For their part, his subjects remain “amiable and obedient toward their lord, so that none leaves the hive before the king does and takes the lead in flying where he pleases.” Honeybees “love their king very much, and they have such faith and courage that they throw themselves into the period of death to protect their king and to rescue him.” And “even though each one strives to do its best to the limit of its abilities, nevertheless there is no envy among them and no hatred,” although they readily “get vengeance on those who cause them harm.” In sum, honeybees provide men a model of the best regime. The one flaw in their regime is the king’s vulnerability. “When he dies or is lost, they lose their faith and judgment in such a way that they lose and destroy their honey, and destroy their hives.”
The ostrich, the lion, and the horse provide the best lessons among the creatures that move on the earth. The ostrich combines laziness, stupidity, and cruelty. “Its disposition is so sluggish that it makes it so terribly forgetful that it cannot remember things,” especially its own eggs, which it covers with sand, “goes off on its business and forgets,” leaving the sun to keep them warm until they hatch. “When the parent find the chicks, instead of feeding and instructing them as they should, they torment them and do s many cruel things as they can to them.” The lion, by contrast, deservedly bears the title, “king of beasts.” He is, as a monarch, more tyrant than king, however; “when he roars, all animals flee as if pursued by death, and where he draws a circle with his tail no animal dares cross it.” At the same time, the lion “fears the white rooster,” “the tumult of wheels,” and fire. God, “who did not allow anything to exist without its opposites decided that the lion, who is prouder and stronger than all other creatures, and through his great fierceness pursues prey always, should have impediments to his cruelty against which he is incapable of defending himself.” The horse may be the most intelligent of the land creatures, “an animal of great knowledge, for since it always goes to live with men, this gives it some sense, so that it knows its master and it often changes customs and habits when it changes masters,” readily and as it were prudently adapting to a new regime. Horses are also fit human companions in war, “happy when they are victorious and sad when they lose, and one can easily observe when the battle will be won or not by whether the horse’s appearance is one of joy or sadness.” Above all, they are loyal. “It is a proven fact about many horses that they weep and shed tears because of the death of their lord, and there is no other animal that does this.”
The moralism of Latini’s bestiary bespeaks the transition from the Treasure‘s first part to the second, which leaves “the theoretical branch of knowledge,” the “first science of the body of philosophy,” in order to enter the second part, which in which he addresses “the practical” branch of knowledge, ethics.
Note
- Latini has given his young gentleman an understandably simplified but also somewhat garbled account. Pope John XII had no blood relationship to Adelbert; he was his “brother” only in being comrades in arms against Otto I and also fellow evildoers, as John was notorious for his debauchery and cruelty.
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