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This article focuses on the notion of “the multitude,” a key term today in operaist and populist interpretations of Machiavelli. Through the study of the lexicon of authors belonging to the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, this article highlights the substantial ambiguity of this term and collective subject. Machiavelli’s focus on the multitude as a “disordered” component of the body politic reveals significant analogies with the contemporary reflection of Pietro Pomponazzi (De incantationibus). From the point of view of the history of social sciences, the hypothesis developed in this article is that the discovery of the psychic dimension of the multitude at the beginning of the sixteenth century constitutes an epistemic turning point that makes it possible to rethink the chronology of the crowd as an object of study and government.