The fox between bestiaries, Renart and Machiavelli: ambiguous cunning
The fox of the Physiologus that plays dead, the Roman de Renart, Dante's Guido da Montefeltro and Machiavelli's Prince: the story of a cunning symbol.
In European culture the fox is the animal of cunning par excellence. Unlike the wolf, which stands for brute strength, the fox wins through deceit, patience and intelligence. This quality, admired and feared at once, earned it an ambivalent reputation: a figure of the devil in medieval bestiaries, a picaresque hero in satirical poems, a political model in the Renaissance. The sources allow us to follow the stages of this long symbolic career with precision.
The fox in the Bible and the Physiologus
In the Song of Songs we read the plea «take us the foxes, the little foxes» that spoil the vines, an image of whatever secretly ruins the fruits of love. Christian commentators read these animals as figures of heretics and of the sins that threaten the Church, strengthening a negative association destined to last for centuries.
The Physiologus, a Greek text of moralised natural history probably composed in Alexandria in the early Christian centuries, relates that the hungry fox plays dead, holding its breath; when birds come close to peck at it, it seizes and devours them. The text interprets the fox as an image of the devil, who deceives those who draw near to his works. The tale passed into Latin and vernacular medieval bestiaries, often accompanied by miniatures.
Renart, the hero of deceit
Between the late twelfth and the thirteenth century the fox became the protagonist of a hugely successful literary cycle, the Roman de Renart, composed in Old French by several authors, among them Pierre de Saint-Cloud. Renart the fox constantly tricks the wolf Isengrin and the other animals at the court of King Noble, the lion, in a sharp satire of feudal society and the clergy.
Its success was such that in French the proper name renard replaced the old word goupil as the word for fox. The stories of Renart were translated and reworked all over Europe: the Low German version Reinke de Vos was printed in Lübeck in 1498, and Goethe drew from it his poem Reineke Fuchs in 1794. The fox thus became an ambiguous hero, likeable and at the same time morally questionable.
From Dante to Machiavelli
Dante uses the fox as a symbol of fraud. In Canto XXVII of the Inferno, Guido da Montefeltro, condemned among the fraudulent counsellors, confesses that his deeds «were not those of a lion, but of a fox». The opposition between lion and fox, that is between strength and cunning, is already fully present, but the poet's judgement is severe: cunning divorced from righteousness leads to damnation.
Two centuries later Machiavelli, in Chapter XVIII of The Prince, overturns the moral judgement and advises the ruler to be «a fox to recognise the snares, and a lion to frighten the wolves». Here the fox becomes a political model: whoever governs must be able to recognise traps, because strength alone is not enough. The image enjoyed immense success in European political thought.
The fox runs through European culture as a symbol always poised between admiration and condemnation. A devil who deceives, a hero who mocks the powerful, a counsellor to the prince: in every age the animal has given a face to a reflection on intelligence and its uses. More than an animal of ill omen, the fox is the mirror of how much people fear, and at the same time desire, cunning.