Is it ever right to deceive on purpose? In the West’s philosophical tradition, the answer, shaped by early and medieval Christian thinkers for whom lying was incompatible with a life well lived, was no. At the end of the 15th century, however, the retired intellectual and politician Giovanni Pontano broke with this tradition. Having lived through the collapse of a Renaissance Mediterranean empire, Pontano advanced two extraordinary theses: first, that misleading another person for the sake of maintaining the state and one’s fellow citizens was virtuous; and, second, that any prudent person could alter the truth, regardless of class, age, gender or education – a democratisation of deception.
Pontano worked in Naples, the centre of culture and intellectual life in the Renaissance Mediterranean in the late 1400s. Within two generations the Trastámara, Aragon’s royal family, who conquered Naples from the Angevin French in 1442, had built their new Italian kingdom into a flourishing political power with an explicitly Hispanic character and imperial ambition. At its height, Naples surpassed Florence, Rome and Venice.
