The essential writings of Machiavelli Read Online Free PDF Page B

Julius II.

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T HE D ISCOURSES
    Machiavelli wrote Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius during his years of exile from Florentine politics, between 1512 and 1519. The work was published posthumously in 1531, one year before The Prince. If The Prince was a treatise on the ideal autocratic ruler , The Discourses are a vigorous championing of a republican form of government. Artists of the Renaissance looked to ancient Rome for inspiration in painting, sculpture, and literature, but The Discourses, despite taking Roman historian Livy as their point of departure, are extremely original. In them Machiavelli proposes for the first time a pragmatic study of Roman history, institutions, and politics, in search of guidance that would lead Renaissance Italy out of its dangerous and chaotic political conditions .
    The Discourses are divided into three books, which are themselves divided into 142 chapters — mirroring the 142 books of Livy’s Histories.

BOOK II
P REFACE
    Men praise the old times and find fault with the present, though not always with justification. They so admire things of the past that they esteem not only what they have come to know through accounts that historians have left us, but also the times that they as old men remember from their youth. When their opinion is flawed—as it is more often than not—I feel certain that this happens for a number of reasons. The first reason, in my view, is that no one knows the whole truth about the past, since in most cases incidents that would have brought disgrace upon earlier times have been concealed, while glorious incidents are rendered fully and are described as having been quite magnificent. This is because most historians bow to the fortunes of conquerors, and in order to make their victories glorious they aggrandize not only what the conquerors have skillfully achieved but also the exploits of the enemy, so that anyone born later, either in the land that was victorious or the land that was defeated, has reason to marvel at those men and those times and is compelled to admire and praise them.
    Furthermore, men hate either from fear or from envy. Consequently, two most compelling reasons for hating things of the past are eliminated: Things of the past cannot harm you, nor is there any cause to envy them. Yet the opposite is true of things you can see, or in which you are involved. As these things are not in any way hidden from you, you can understand them fully and can discern precisely what you like as well as many things you dislike. As a result, you judge these things inferior to those of the past, even if in fact the things of the present deserve far more fame and glory. I do not mean matters concerning the arts, which are so brilliantly clear that time cannot diminish their glory or give them more glory than they deserve, but matters connected to life and customs, in which one cannot see such clear testimony.
    I would like to point out, however, that though men tend to praise the past and find fault with the present, they are not always wrong to do so. Sometimes it is necessary for us to arrive at such a judgment, as human affairs are always in motion and will consequently either rise or fall. We see a city or country founded with a vital political order by an excellent man, and see it continue to develop toward the better, for a time, through the skill of its founder. Anyone who is born in such a land and praises ancient more than modern times is deceiving himself, which is caused by the issues that I pointed out above. But men born later in that city or country, during the period of its decline, do not deceive themselves.
    As I contemplate how these things develop, I judge the world as having always been in the same condition: that there has always been as much good as evil, with the good and evil varying from country to country. We can see this from what we know of ancient kingdoms that differed from one another because of the variety