Speculum Principis

Background:
The speculum principis (literally: “a mirror of the prince”) is a genre of literature that is written to a “prince” (king, prince or leader of any sort) to serve as a guide on how to behave and how to rule. It is a “mirror” in that it reflects both good princes and bad ones, and may or may not reflect the actual prince to whom it is written. The most famous example of a speculum principis is Machiavelli’s Prince [which all young university students should read—hint, hint]. Other examples include Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince and the ancient examples of Isocrates, To Nikoles and Xenephon,
On the Education of Cyrus.

Machiavelli dedicates The Prince to the Lorenzo De’Medici, the new prince of Florence, in the hopes of being reinstated
in Florentine politics. The dedication begins:

To the Magnificent Lorenzo Di Piero De' Medici:
Those who strive to obtain the good graces of a prince are
accustomed to come before him with such things as they hold most
precious, or in which they see him take most delight; whence one
often sees horses, arms, cloth of gold, precious stones, and
similar ornaments presented to princes, worthy of their greatness.
Desiring therefore to present myself to your Magnificence with
some testimony of my devotion towards you, I have not found among my possessions anything which I hold more dear than, or value so much as, the knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired by long experience in contemporary affairs, and a continual study of antiquity; which, having reflected upon it with great and
prolonged diligence, I now send, digested into a little volume, to
your Magnificence.

It is in this spirit that I have created this writing assignment: that knowledge obtained from a continual study of
antiquity is a gift, to oneself and for others.

Assignment:
Machiavelli’s gift to Lorenzo, a new prince, is specific: how to obtain and maintain power. Your assignment is to compose a literary guidebook, a speculum principis, which meditates, as a whole, on the universal theme of “what it means to be human.” You can discuss politics, of course (the difficulty of ruling—Gilgamesh, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Creon, Pentheus), but your guidebook will have a much broader scope, addressing themes of your choice that we covered over the course of the semester (the nature of human happiness, friendship, grief, mortality, glory, vengeance, justice, human nature, duty/piety and heroism, death and dying, society and social relations, the nature of politics, religion, etc., etc., etc.).

The essay will be in epistolary format and will be comprised of advice to a “prince” (or “princess”)—the term can be loosely applied—see below. The body of the essay will be composed of your advice to the recipient, given in the form of selected passages (quotations) from our readings, accompanied by your analysis. Thus, you will show the way in which the texts that you have read serve as a guide for learning about things human. Each quotation need not “advise” per se; you may choose quotations that illuminate or well-express some important aspect of the human condition, but your analysis should express what, specifically, one learns from your selection.The collection as a whole should work together to “teach” the reader about the joys, sorrows, difficulties, and triumphs[etc.] of the human experience.

You have much from which to choose.
Minimum requirement: Include 20 quotations from the selections below, from ten distinct works. Choose more if you are
so inclined—this is your collection.

1. Gilgamesh.
2. Hesiod, Theogony
3. Hesiod, Works and Days
4. Homer, Iliad
5. Homer, Odyssey
6. Aeschylus, Agamemnon
7. Aeschylus, Eumenides
8. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos
9. Sophocles, Antigone
10. Euripides, Medea
11. Euripides, Bacchae
12. Euripides, The Madness of Heracles
13. Ovid, Metamorphoses
14. Apuleius, The Golden Ass

This aspect of your guidebook is creative—you must create the scenario in which (and to whom) you are writing, and you have complete creative license. For example, you may be you writing to someone you know (a son, a sister, a friend); you may be you writing to someone you do not know (the President of the United States; Elon Musk; Gandalf the Grey;); you may be someone else—a character real or fiction—writing to anyone else, real or fiction (Enkidu to Gilgamesh; Oedipus to Antigone; Agamemnon to Elon Musk, Albus Dumbledore to Harry Potter, Ovid to Pentheus, etc. etc.). Do your best to have the tone of your dedication reflect the relationship of your characters.