Ambition, A History

From Vice to Virtue

William Casey King

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780300189841
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

Is "ambitious" a compliment? It depends: "[A] masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history."—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambitionfuels the American Dream. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice, everything from "a canker on the soul" to the impetus for original sin. This engaging book explores ambition's surprising transformation, tracing attitudes from classical antiquity to early modern Europe to the New World and America's founding. From this broad historical perspective, William Casey King deepens our understanding of the American mythos and offers a striking reinterpretation of the introduction to the Declaration of Independence.
Through an innovative array of sources and authors—Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and many others—King demonstrates that a transformed view of ambition became possible the moment Europe realized that Columbus had discovered not a new route but a new world. In addition the author argues that reconstituting ambition as a virtue was a necessary precondition of the American republic.The book suggests that even in the twenty-first century, ambition has never fully lost its ties to vice and continues to exhibit a dual nature—positive or negative depending upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.

1
From Vice to Christian Sin

The story is told of an exchange between the legendary economic historian Jack Fisher and an importunate pupil who was pressing him for a reading list on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English economic history. [Fisher] said, “If you really want to understand the period, go away and read the Bible.”

— Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution

[God] reprocheth Adam’s miserie, whereinto he was fallen by ambition.

— Genesis 3:22, Geneva Bible, marginal note

The word ambition reaches English directly through Latin or sometimes by Latin through Old French. Ambition is derived from the Latin compound verb ambire, “go round.” Does this mean that the concept that we attach to the word ambition did not exist before the Latin word emerged as its etymological root? Of course not. Scholars have recognized ambition as present throughout history. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest written story, from the ancient tablets of Sumeria, we learn of the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is driven by the “spur on the … ambition to leave an enduring name” and enters the Cedar Forest guarded by Humbaba the terrible.¹ For eminent archaeologist and historian Nancy Sandars, Gilgamesh embodies our modern conception of ambition. But reading modern notions of ambition into ancient endeavors is a risky business and should be resisted to avoid the pitfalls of reifying the concept.

The ground in ancient Greece might seem steadier, as many sources on ambition in this period were those read and studied in Anglo-America.² Thucydides, popular among the Founders and listed in the libraries of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, among others, wrote of the Athenians with a word translated into English as “ambition”: “From motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would only have brought honor and profit to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of war.”³

Robert Faulkner, in his work on noble ambition, considers Alcibiades as a Greek example of “unbounded ambition.”⁴ John Dryden, too, in his English translation of Plutarch’s Alcibiades, writes: “His conduct displayed many great inconsistencies and variations, not unnaturally, in accordance with the many and wonderful vicissitudes of his fortunes; but among the many strong passions of his real character, the one most prevailing of all was his ambition and his desire of superiority.”⁵

The problem is that there is no one Greek word for ambition. Rather, three Greek words have been translated into our English word ambition. Just as historians must accept the change in the meanings of words through time, so they must not fall prey to assuming a stasis in translations of ancient concepts into contemporary parlance.

The three Greek words that have been translated into the English word ambition are: philotimia (alternatively philotimeomai), literally “the love of honor”; eritheia, “rivalry” or “strife”; and philodoxia, “love of acclaim.”

Philotimia, love of honor, was a central theme in Greek life and culture. It was widely considered to be among the driving forces of Greek achievement, and therefore conveys much of the contemporary sense of ambition.⁶ But philotimia was not as invariably positive, as many scholars assume. The word was originally imagined to be a negative personal attribute, “ambition for a person’s own profit and private prestige.”⁷ But by the mid-fourth century, it began to be understood as “private contribution for the benefit of the polis, for which the contributor was rewarded with public gratitude, charis.”⁸ One wonders if part of ambition’s later duality might have been informed by a similar change through time in ancient Greece. Or, perhaps, as Greek culture became more fluid, a demos (the “people”) spurred by philotimia like-wise became more accepted.

The second word often translated into ambition is philodoxia, love of acclaim. In Plutarch, Alcibiades is characterized by both philotimia and philodoxia.⁹ But philodoxia, like philotimia, can have a negative aspect. In addition to stating that love of acclaim can drive an individual to recognition aligned with the public good, Plutarch also calls philodoxia a “malady of the soul.”¹⁰

The third word, eritheia, “rivalry or strife,” is also translated into English as ambition or selfish ambition. The New International Version of the Bible, for example, defines eritheia as “selfish ambition.” Strong’s concordance defines eritheia as “rivalry, hence ambition,” and the “seeking of followers and adherents by means of gifts, the seeking of followers, hence ambition, rivalry, self-seeking; a feud, faction.”¹¹

In Aristotle, eritheia denotes “a self-seeking pursuit of political office by unfair means.”¹² The origin of the word is debated. Some scholars argue that it derives from eris, “strife,” the name of the Greek goddess of discord, who possesses a golden apple that she throws to engender enmity among friends and war among enemies, notably the Trojan War.¹³ Others argue that the word finds its roots not in eris but in erithos, “common laborer.” They explain that the Greeks used the word to mean working in one’s self-interest for a wage.¹⁴ Yet perhaps a third possibility, not ventured in the literature, is the source.

We know that there had been a momentous change in ancient Greece during the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries. During this period a “popular movement” of demiourgoi (“craftsmen”) and thetes (literally, “doers”) arose to form a new order and garner political power. These “democrats” demanded political recognition and reform, challenging the aristocrats. As people of humble origins vied for political power, upheaval, rivalry, and strife ensued.¹⁵ I would argue that eritheia has its origins not in eris (rivalry, strife) or erithos (common laborer) but in both. The confusion over its origins is resolved if we look at this period of extraordinarily violent and tumultuous internal struggle, an era of the assertion of prerogative by the craftsmen and doers.¹⁶ The rise of the common laborer was seen as the origin of rivalry and strife.

The Latin origins of the English word are decidedly less mysterious. Ambitio was originally used to describe Roman candidates for office who would canvass or solicit votes. There were no dictionaries of Latin usage per se during the Roman Empire. Modern Latin dictionaries look back and attempt to reconstitute meaning based on usage. For our purposes, this is extremely helpful in mitigating the risk of confusing linguistic similarity with conceptual similarity. It is not just the word. It is a concept reflected by the word.

Ambitio is used by the Romans almost exclusively for those with a public life.¹⁷ While the first use of ambition was rather neutral, canvassing soon became “insistence in seeking favors, importunity,” which soon became “corrupt practices in seeking honors, verdicts, graft and intrigue.” It is worth listing all the Latin uses because the multiple meanings provide insight into the complexity of the notion both in antiquity and in later periods. In addition, because early Anglo-American culture was preoccupied with the Romans, Latin usage is informative. At any rate ambitio is defined as in The Oxford Latin Dictionary as: “1. Canvassing votes; 2. A standing for public office, candidature; 3. Rivalry for honors, competition; 4. Striving after popularity, currying favor; 5. Desire for advancement; 6. Interested motives, self-interest; 7. Partiality, favoritism; 8. Vain display, ostentation, show.”

The Roman historian Titus Livius, known to us as Livy, uses ambitio in a neutral sense to mean “electioneering,” although the negative connotations dominate his history of Rome.¹⁸ Ambitio is found throughout Livy’s work in his description of political evils. Livy considered ambitio an inescapable danger to concordia and libertas, a threat that when joined by the pernicious avaritia luxuriaque (avarice beyond bounds, luxurious avarice or greed), would destroy the Republic.¹⁹ Livy also identifies laws in Roman history (leges de ambitu) enacted to mitigate the destructive potential of ambitio, the first of which was the Lex Poetelia, enacted in 358 BCE.²⁰ The law was specifically a restriction on the places where a candidate could canvass for votes, but it is generally agreed to have been passed to prevent the new men, the plebeians, from gaining political power.²¹

Not only Livy recognized the dangerous potential of ambitio. Of particular interest to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Anglo-American culture are the works of the Stoics, much-studied ancient antecedents of early modern thought. Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), a Roman historian (86–35/34 BCE), takes up ambition in his War with Catiline, written around 40 BCE. In it, he portrays the struggle between civic virtue as embodied by Caesar and Cato and ambition and corruption as represented by the Roman patrician Catiline. Sallust warns that “ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.”²² He explicitly condemns ambition as a vice (vitium), though not quite as evil as the sin of avarice (avaritia).²³

For Cicero, ambition is a “malady,” but it is a malady that seems to draw “the greatest souls” and “most brilliant geniuses.”²⁴ It is, therefore, both a blessing and a curse, a deluding self-absorption that can cause its victims to “lose sight of their claims to justice.” In his De officiis (On duties on obligations), Cicero writes an essay in the form of a letter to his son in which he elaborates on this virtuous vice:

The great majority of people, however, when they fall a prey to ambition for either military or civil authority, are carried away by it so completely that they quite lose sight of the claims of justice.… We saw this proved but now in the effrontery of Gaius Caesar, who, to gain that sovereign power which by a depraved imagination he had conceived in his fancy, trod underfoot all laws of gods and men. But the trouble about this matter is that it is in the greatest souls and in the most brilliant geniuses that we usually find ambitions for civil and military authority, for power, and for glory, springing; and therefore we must be the more heedful not to go wrong in that direction.²⁵

Seneca, like Cicero, considers ambition one of the evils of the mind, a “mala mentis humanae.”²⁶ He also alludes to the deceptive, seductive nature of ambition. While it appears to be a source of greatness, it is in fact a trap leading to misery.²⁷

Quintilian, however, suggests an interesting departure from the dominant view and recognizes ambition’s positive potential. He wrote, “Though ambition may be a fault in itself, it is often the mother of virtues.”²⁸ But in Quintilian’s time, though he and Sallust both recognized ambition’s duality, the dominant notion of ambition was still firmly vitium, “vice.” One can trace this emergent strain, ambition’s dual nature, in Quintilian, later realized in Machiavelli, the seventeenth-century Puritan divine Bishop Manton, and as I illustrate in later chapters, in colonization and Republican revolution.

The next question is how this secular vice becomes Christian sin. The patristic texts provide answers and clues for our later understanding of ambition in Anglo-American thought. It has been noted that a feature of later English Protestantism is the weight of patristic writing, especially that of the first five centuries. This tendency has been noted both before and after the English Revolution of 1640.²⁹

Augustine uses the word ambition in Confessions when he speaks of ambitio saeculi, “worldly ambition,” as the chief enemy of the good life. But it would be exceedingly narrow to exclude certain phrases that he uses synonymously with “worldly ambition.” In On True Religion, he expresses the similar idea of dominationis temporalis faustus, “haughtiness of temporal domination”; in The City of God, he writes of libido dominandi, “lust for power”; and in Confessions, he uses libido principandi, “the lust for being first.”³⁰ Significantly, however, in ambition, we witness Augustine as the Western cultural “Christianizer” of antiquity. In Augustine we see one path that ambitio makes from Roman vice to Christian sin.

In the Contra Julianum, written late in his life, Augustine directly links ambition and sin. Augustine imagines sin as “three-headed,” using the word capita, “head,” which leads one to speculate whether Augustine is evoking some monstrous beast of the sort found in medieval illuminations. One wonders, too, at his choice of three heads of sin. Augustine was a key figure in the Trinitarian debates, and it is tempting to speculate that “three” answers the need for balance between distinct elements of the Trinity with their evil counterpart, but this is pure speculation.³¹ What is important is that the three sources are the lust for carnal experience, the lust for being first, and the lust for looking. This last one I have translated literally, but Michael Foley translates it “pernicious knowledge.” He makes the intriguing case that Augustine does not condemn these traits per se, only the ends to which they aspire, writing that Augustine tries to emphasize the “importance of directing these desires towards their true fulfillment.”³²

If by this Foley is arguing that the notion of somehow “harnessing” or “chan...