In 1587 Tasso stated that he had promised Fabio Orsini, who had recently joined his group of supporters, that he would write a short work to “riprovare l’opinione di Plutarco de la virtù e fortuna di Alessandro, e di quella de’ Romani” (T. Tasso, Le lettere, edited by C. Guasti, 5 vols, Florence, Le Monnier, 1852-55, vol. III, 225). Three years later, in March 1590, Tasso kept his promise by completing his Risposta di Roma a Plutarco before leaving for Florence. His text challenges two short pamphlets by Plutarch (De fortuna Romanorum and De fortuna vel virtute Alexandri) which had claimed that the greatness of the Roman Empire was a product of Fortune rather than Virtue, and refers to both Livy’s work on the topic and Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio. To defend the virtue of the Romans, Tasso uses a rich collection of examples from ancient history, discusses military matters in depth, and makes reference to the vast amount of material he had read over the years, commenting at length on the order of nature and the universe as an example of a regulated cosmos, in which nothing (not even the long rule of the Romans) happens by chance. These issues were soon to emerge in the lines of the Mondo creato, here formulated not in verse but in carefully-constructed prose with tones of pathos, setting the Risposta among the final significant works of sixteenth century rhetoric.

Francesco Pesellino (Fransceso di Stefano), Allegory of Rome, St Petersburg, Hermitage