Any proper investigation of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state has to commence where his own investigation begins: with his definition of what states are. Accordingly, this chapter elucidates the particular theory of definition which informs Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato. Machiavelli is continually preoccupied with what we ‘call’ things – or how we ‘nominate’ them, as he sometimes puts it. These are matters of definition in a technical sense, pursued according to a set of argumentative procedures derived from the pages of the ancient Roman rhetorical theorists Cicero and Quintilian. This chapter reconstructs their theory of definition, showing how they classify things in rhetorical argument, before turning to illustrate the theory in action in Roman antiquity by examining how the concept of the civitas – the crucially important political noun used in classical Latin to denote ‘the city’, ‘city-state’, or ‘citizenry’ – is handled in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, and Augustine. The second section of the chapter analyses the reception of this theory and its application to the idea of the civitas in medieval and Renaissance political culture in order to explain how and why Machiavelli comes to rely upon it.

Roman rhetoric, deployed as a legal and political tool and as a means of generating social capital, presupposes that the words of the speaker or writer initiate a dynamic, socially efficacious process of reception, and that that process is the real point of speaking or writing at all. Words shape audience reactions; and yet they can’t tightly and precisely control them. The text taken on its own proffers meaning in potentia only. It’s actualized in the reactions of its readers. But readers are multiple, never the reader. Communities of readers are always ad hoc and at best imperfectly coherent, and the consequent instabilities of reception open a space for the articulation of heterodox sexual identities. It is these less stable but potentially more productive aspects of preterition—and with them an expanded understanding of the device that goes beyond the textbook definition—that this book will consider, as they inform a select group of medieval texts whose readerships extended from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and beyond. Contemporary queer theory offers a useful framework through which to analyze these potentially subversive receptions of canonical texts.