Political letter to Giulio Giordani

According to Luigi Firpo’s reconstruction (in T. Tasso, Tre scritti politici, Turin, Utet, 1980), in August 1578, during a short stay in Urbino, Tasso undertook to comment on an issue, part-philosophical and part-political, concerning the best form of government. He chose the letter format, addressing the letter to Giulio Giordani, secretary at the Urbino Court, but took as his target in the polemic the earlier response by Sperone Speroni, who had claimed that the duration of governments was not important in judging them. Very much in favour of the principate, Tasso argued that duration through the years and even through the centuries was indeed a criterion for defining the excellence of forms of government, as in the case of the Roman Empire. While the choice simply reiterated ideas already set out in his early dialogues (Forno overo de la nobiltà and Della dignità), at certain points Tasso’s vision appears marked by pragmatic realism, such as his urging in matters of state to seek not “rigid and strict honesty, but honesty tempered and softened by usefulness” (translated from T. Tasso, Tre scritti politici, Turin, Utet, 1980, 146). Bolder political positions were expressed in another dialogue entitled Della precedenza, where he explicitly cites the Machiavellian principle, in spite of the Index veto hanging over it since 1559. Although not a systematic approach to political thought, this work indicates Tasso’s awareness of the issue as formulated at the end of the sixteenth century.