Involuntary otium
It is notable that, as soon as M. is released from prison (on 12 March, the day before writing this letter), he immediately begins seeking F. Vettori’s support in order to return into political service. The conspicuous urgency of the letter is part of the careful self-fashioning of the former secretary, who seems to despise inactivity, and therefore mounts a clever campaign intended to restore him to (public) office as soon as possible. The expression “crederrei fare onore a voi e utile a me” (“I believe I shall do honor to you and do something useful for me”) in particular highlights M.’s skill in negotiating the pragmatic aspects of social relationships.
Otium and Action
The verbs ‘operare’ and ‘adoperare’ might also call to mind Machiavelli’s military background. He uses these lexemes in his Libro dell’arte della guerra, for instance, whereby M. most likely planned to recommend himself as a military advisor to the Medici. Especially in the proem, M.’s narrating subject stages the composition of his Art of War as, on the one hand, a way “not to pass these my idle times without doing anything” (“per non passare questi mia ociosi tempi sanza operare alcuna cosa,” emphasis added) and, on the other, as contrasting his potential errors while writing (“gli errori che io facessi scrivendo”) with those of others “fatti operando.” The wording might also evoke a performative contradiction of sorts, i. e. the context and the preconditions of an utterance undermine its content. For the author M. had indeed been responsible for the Florentine militia whose failure (perhaps also due to his own errors) caused the downfall of the Soderini government, in which he himself had served as secretary. In the proemio to Art of War, paradoxically, writing is a way of “operare” and, at the same time, opposed to “operando” in the military sense. The same holds true for otium, as it were, as the “ociosi tempi” give way to another kind of action, negotium or ‘operare,’ both literary and military. To some extent, the fictional setting of the dialogue on the Art of War in a situation of collective otium in the tree shade of the Orti Oricellari corresponds to the paradoxical structure of Machiavellian notions of otium, leisure, and idleness: Otium is, on the one hand, the conditio sine qua non of a dialogue that, on the other, exposes the dangerous consequences of times of peace and leisure for the soldiers (cf. Book I, p. 19 et passim).
The semantic parallels between the vocabulary used in the letters and that in the military dialogue might already hint at Machiavelli’s conception of the correspondence with F. Vettori as a new kind of military campaign on the battlefield of letters.
Epistolary Strategies of Otium
The letter from 13 March 1513 corroborates the hypothesis that the humanist tradition of letter writing is used strategically. Within the context of retreat as a military practice, the art of the epistolary, which is both conceived as a product of and designed to create otiose leisure for the reader, is significantly transformed into a social and political tool. M.’s complex reasoning on the potential opposition but also interactions(s) between literary and military operations anticipates several topoi of the long debate on the relationship between military theory and practice, and, more specifically, on the question of whether, in battle, field experience should count more than the reading of ancient theory. From the perspective of otium as retreat, this problem is inherent in military culture as such: spaces of otium and leisure (of pausing, waiting, retreat or cease-fire as well as of reading and writing) are an essential part of warfare and not necessarily its opposite.
