# CHAPTER 49 — If a Republic Is to Be Kept Free, Each Day It Requires New Measures; and the Good Qualities for Which Quinctius Fabius Was Called Maximus

Every day in a great city, as has been said many times, accidents necessarily arise that require a physician, and the more important such accidents are, the more necessary it is to find the wisest physician. If such accidents ever arose in any city, they arose in Rome, both strange and unexpected ones; as, for instance, when it looked as if all Roman women had conspired against their husbands to murder them, and many were discovered who had poisoned them, and many who had prepared the poison to do so. Another such event discovered during the time of the Macedonian war was the conspiracy of the Bacchanals, which involved many thousands of men and women, and it would have been dangerous for that city, had it not been discovered, or had the Romans not been accustomed to punishing great numbers of wrong-doers, because if the greatness of that republic and the power of its executive actions are not seen in countless other ways, they are evident in the severity of the punishments that the Romans imposed upon those who erred. Rome never hesitated to put to death in the interest of justice an entire legion at a time or an entire city, or to banish eight or ten thousand men under extraordinary conditions to be endured not just by one man but by many; this happened to those soldiers who had fought unsuccessfully at Cannae and who were banished to Sicily, for they were forbidden to take lodgings in towns and were required to eat standing up.

But of all the forms of executive action, decimating the armies was most terrifying; in this instance, one of every ten men in an entire army was chosen to be executed by lot. Nor could one find a more frightening punishment than this one to bring a multitude under control, for when a multitude errs, and there is no certain instigator, all cannot be punished since they are too numerous, and to punish only a part, leaving others unpunished, would be doing a wrong to those who are punished, while the unpunished would have the courage to err once again. But by killing the tenth part by lot, when all deserve execution, whoever is punished mourns his fate; whoever is not punished is afraid that on another occasion it will be his turn and takes care not to go astray.

The poisoners and the Bacchanals, therefore, were punished according to the nature of their sins. Although such diseases in a republic have evil effects, they are not deadly, for there is almost always time to correct them; but for those which concern the state, there is no time, and unless they are cured by a prudent man, they will cause the downfall of the city. Because of the generosity the Romans displayed in giving citizenship to foreigners, so many new people were born in Rome that they began to possess a large percentage of the vote, so that the government began to change, departing from those policies and those men it was accustomed to employ. Aware of this, Quinctius Fabius, who was the censor, placed all these new people, who were the source of this disorder, within four tribes, so that they could not, reduced to such small spaces, corrupt all of Rome. This matter was well understood by Fabius, and he provided a suitable remedy for it without changing the government; it was so widely accepted by that civic body that he deserved to be called Maximus.





EXPLANATORY NOTES


to Zanobi Buondelmonti: Machiavelli also dedicated his Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca to Buondelmonti (1491–1527), who was a member of the Florentine republican circle identified with the Orti Oricellari, the garden belonging to the Rucellai family at which Machiavelli apparently discussed his commentary on Livy with other humanists; he is also one of the interlocutors in Machiavelli’s humanist dialogue, The Art of War. Buondelmonti was forced to flee Florence in 1522 when an anti-Medici conspiracy in which he was involved was uncovered; he returned during the short-lived restoration of the republic in 1527, only to die shortly thereafter.





and Cosimo Rucellai: like Buondelmonti, one of the interlocutors of Machiavelli’s dialogue on warfare, Cosimo was the host of the political discussions at the Orti Oricellari (1495—1519). His grandfather Bernardo (1448–1514), a staunch supporter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who first laid out the gardens of the Orti Oricellari, was the author of a history of the invasion of Italy by Charles V in 1494–5, De bello italico, in which the concept of the ‘balance of power’ is first discussed.





Hiero of Syracuse: king of Syracuse (306–215 BC).





Perseus of Macedonia: last king of Macedonia (213–162 BC), defeated in 168 by Paulus Aemilius at Pydna and led in chains back to Rome for the victor’s triumph.





in the beginning: that is, in the Preface to Book I; the dedication was originally placed after the end of Book III in some editions and manuscript copies of The Discourses.





Preface to Autograph Manuscript: as Giorgio Inglese notes in a discussion of the manuscript tradition of Machiavelli’s Discorsi (Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984), 31–42), most modern editions of this work depart from Mazzoni’s 1929 edition, which accepts the version of the preface in the autograph manuscript rather than the revised preface that appeared in the first (1531) printed edition. Inglese believes, on the contrary, that the printed edition reflects Machiavelli’s final version. In this translation we have reprinted both the traditional preface, generally employed in other current translations, as well as the briefer version from the 1531 book. The differences between the two versions are subtle but extremely significant.





new methods and institutions: while virtù (ability, skill, merit, ingenuity, strength, sometimes even virtue) is the key intellectual concept underlying The Prince, Machiavelli focuses upon methods and institutions (modie ordini nuovi) in the Discourses on Livy. His emphasis thus shifts from the personal characteristics of an individual hero toward the political effects of state-building and a government’s key institutions. This distinction holds true in spite of the fact that Machiavelli omits this important passage in the revised preface published in the first 1531 edition.





unknown lands and seas: Machiavelli implicitly compares his new direction in republican political theory to the courageous explorations of Italian navigators such as Columbus, Vespucci, and Verrazzano. This metaphor was removed from the published preface.





today’s religion: in the autograph manuscript, Machiavelli blames religion for the decadence of contemporary civil society, but the first printed edition points the finger at a more generalized defective education, training, or upbringing; in short, a cultural shortcoming rather than a religious one.





all the books by Livy: of the original 142 books in Livy’s history of Rome, books 1–10 and 21–45 survived, but books 41–5 came to light only in 1527, too late to influence Machiavelli’s thinking before his death.





today’s education: the change from religion to education (in the broadest sense of training, good habits, or sound upbringing) in the printed version represents the most significant revision of the original manuscript.





in Ragusa: now Dubrovnik in the former Yugoslavia, Ragusa was a maritime republic once in the Venetian sphere of influence but controlled, after 1526, by the Ottoman Turks.





the Mamelukes: rulers of Egypt from 1252 until 1517, when Cairo was captured by the Ottoman Turks.





Dinocrates: the architect who designed Alexandria for Alexander; this anecdote concerning his proposal to reshape Mount Athos can be found in a number of ancient authors, including Strabo, Lucian, and especially Vitruvius (The Ten Books of Architecture, ii., Introduction).





were destroyed: between June and September of 1502, after the rebellion of Arezzo and the Valdichiana against Florentine dominion, as well as the capture of Urbino by Cesare Borgia, the Florentine government decided to create the post of gonfaloniere or standard-bearer for life, a post that was occupied by Machiavelli’s patron, Piero Soderini. Exactly a decade later (29 August 1512), Spanish troops sacked Prato, causing the downfall of Soderini’s republic and the eventual return of the Medici family to govern Florence, an event that brought Machiavelli’s career in the Florentine Chancery to an abrupt halt.





come to be pernicious: this important chapter of the Discourses on Livy reflects Machiavelli’s reliance upon the Greek historian Polybius’ discussion of Roman history and government in his Histories (2nd century BC). The political theory of Polybius was revived in Florence in the fifteenth century, and Books I-V were rendered from Greek into Latin as early as 1450 by Niccolò Perotti for Pope Nicholas V; an Italian translation of Polybius appeared in 1546 some years after Machiavelli’s death. Since most scholars believe Machiavelli read little or no Greek and the important Book VI had not been translated into Latin during Machiavelli’s lifetime, there has been a great deal of scholarly debate about exactly how Machiavelli might have had access to the ideas in Book VI. The most likely answer is that Machiavelli’s republican friends in the Orti Oricellari discussed with him the material not yet available in Latin or Italian. Bernardo Rucellai, the founder of the gardens where these discussions took place, apparently used Book VI of Polybius in a work he wrote around 1505. See Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Penguin, 1979), for an English translation.





And this is the cycle: here Machiavelli accepts the analysis of a political cycle put forward by Polybius, a circular sequence to which Polybius gives the name anacyclosis. Apparently, in a now-lost section of Book VI of his Histories, Polybius maintained that the Romans fortunately converted their oligarchy not into a democracy (as his theory requires) but into the mixed constitution where the three elements of the state (the consuls representing the monarchy, the senate representing the aristocracy, and the popular element) were perfectly balanced.





in tranquillity for that city: Machiavelli arrives at this total of 800 years of tranquillity under the constitution of Lycurgus by considering Sparta free until the city was absorbed into the Roman empire in 27 BC.





the discord between the plebeians and the senate: classical and medieval political theory generally criticized a republican form of government because of the social conflict often attributed by traditional political theorists to this form of government; with his emphasis on the fact that Rome’s republican government achieved unparalleled stability through social conflict, Machiavelli introduced one of his most original contributions to republican thinking.





as Cicero declares: De Amicitia (On Friendship), 25–6.





two of them: two plebeian consuls were elected for the first time in 172 BC.





the censorship: the first plebeian censor was Gaius Marcius Rutulus, elected to the office in 351 BC.





the praetorship: the first plebeian praetor, elected in 337 BC, was Quintus Publilius Philo.





Marius and the ruin of Rome: Gaius Marius (157–86 BC), head of the popular party in Rome, whose biography Machiavelli consulted in Plutarch’s Lives. Machiavelli considered Marius, the Gracchi, and Julius Caesar responsible for the destruction of republican liberty in Rome.





Marcus Menenius and Marcus Fulvius: while Machiavelli’s edition of Livy gave these two names in its description of the events which took place in 314 BC, current critical editions of Livy cite two different individuals: Gaius Maenius and Marcus Folius. The master of horse served as an assistant to the dictator.





a king with a small senate: actually two kings and twenty-eight senators.





they closed the avenue to participation: Machiavelli refers here to the momentous serrata or closing of the Maggior Consiglio in 1297, an act calculated to reinforce the control of a small circle of patrician families in Venice and to eliminate the influence of a larger, more popular assembly.





and those who are governed: Machiavelli badly miscalculates the proportions of the governors and the governed in Venice; between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, some 1,200 to 2,500 nobles had access to the government out of a population that ranged from 120,000 to 160,000 inhabitants.





the complete ruin of the republic: the rebellion broke out in 379 BC, and eight years later, under the leadership of Pelopidas, the Spartans were defeated by the Thebans and their hegemony in Greece was destroyed for ever.





in a single day: at the disastrous battle of Agnadello (1509), Venice was opposed by the League of Cambrai (France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the papacy) and lost almost all of the possessions it had gained on terra firma. Machiavelli does not add that by 1517, however, most of these territories had been regained by the Serenissima.





humours: in his political works, Machiavelli constantly draws parallels between the human body and the body politic. Renaissance scientific theory relied upon the works of Galen, Hippocrates, and their learned commentators to explain the behaviour of the human body by various mixtures of four different humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Anthony J. Parel’s The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) persuasively argues that Machiavelli’s original view of the body politic as a dynamic organism achieving unity through the conflict of opposing institutions reflects this Renaissance theory of the humours accepted in Machiavelli’s times.





to plead his case: the incident cited by Machiavelli from Livy’s history concerning Gaius Marcius Coriolanus took place in 491 BC.





Francesco Valori: one of the Florentine aristocrats who engineered the ouster of Piero de’ Medici from the Florentine government in 1494 and a staunch supporter of Savonarola, Valori was murdered by Medici supporters shortly before Savonarola’s execution in 1498.





except by a sect: here Machiavelli uses the religious term (sètta) that underlines heresy or divergence from orthodoxy rather thanparte (‘faction’).





Piero Soderini: see note to p. 23.





before eight judges: Machiavelli’s reference to this number arises from the institution of the Otto diguardia, eight Florentine magistrates who were entrusted with the administration of justice in the republic and who examined Soderini on the charge of public corruption before pronouncing him innocent.





in his history: Livy, v. 3 3.





the barbarian forces: this incident occurred in 391 BC, a year before the Gauls (called by Machiavelli here and elsewhere franciosi or ‘French’ rather than galli or ‘Gauls’) sacked Rome; Clausium is known today as Chiusi.





not inferior to him: awakened by the famous geese of the Capitol, Manlius turned back a night attack of the Gauls against the citadel on the Capitol in 386 BC, thereby gaining the name Capitolinus; in 390 BC, Furius Camillus lifted the Gauls’ siege of Rome with troops brought from the city of Veii.





a dictator: Aulus Cornelius Cossus, created dictator in 385 BC.





and from sects to ruin: Machiavelli again employs the religious term ‘sects’ (sètte) to mean factions, parties, or interest groups; he views any such group negatively if it does not pursue the common good and operates only in the defence of narrowly defined political interests.





Giovanni Guicciardini, its commissioner: Guicciardini commanded this army in 1430; Machiavelli discusses this incident in his Florentine Histories (iv. 25).





Captain [of the People]: a magistracy of the judiciary; although Messer Giovanni was cited by this office, his patrician connections managed to quash the indictment (see Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, iv. 25).





to make changes in Florence: these unnamed partisans of the popular faction in Florence were led by the Medici family; Cosimo de’ Medici eventually returned from exile to Florence in 1434 and immediately established a republic controlled by his family and their partisans.





the ruin of that republic: that is, the downfall of the republic characterized as a governo stretto, or a government with limited popular participation. Controlled by the Degli Albizzi family and its supporters, this government managed Florentine affairs between 1393 and 1433 until the return of Cosimo de’ Medici from foreign exile.





as his companion in the kingdom: Livy (i. 14) actually declares that Titus Tatius was killed in a riot in Lavinium, but that Romulus was unconcerned by his death, perhaps thinking the man received what he deserved.





in order to set them aright: this statement about the relationship of means and ends should be compared with the remarks Machiavelli makes in The Prince (XVIII). Conventional wisdom identifies Machiavelli with an unsophisticated notion that the ‘ends justify the means’, but in fact, Machiavelli only suggests such an idea in the most serious of circumstances—here, Romulus’ establishment of the most important republican form of government in world history.





absolutist and tyrannical: according to Giorgo Inglese’s commentary on Discourses on Livy (p. 215), the original Italian terms (‘uno vivere civile e libero... uno assoluto e tirannico‘) form an equation treating the theme of laws and the government’s goal. A government is either free or absolutist, depending upon whether it has the proper laws or lacks them; it is either free or tyrannical, depending upon whether it operates in the interests of the common good or for some particular, private interest.





establish a tyranny: the Spartan Ephors were five magistrates elected annually to oversee the city’s affairs of state. Agis IV was king of Sparta between 250 and 241 BC, and in his desire to reinstitute Lycurgus’ laws he was opposed by Leonidas. Machiavelli takes this example, interpreted rather loosely, from Plutarch’s Lives.





extravagantly praised: unlike Dante, Machiavelli considered P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus (235–183 BC), the conqueror of Hannibal and Carthage, as the supreme Roman republican hero, and he viewed Julius Caesar (c.100–44 BC), following the Florentine humanist tradition, as the destroyer of republican liberty. The other three pairs of good rulers and tyrants come from Greek history: Agesilaus II, king of Sparta (444–360 BC); Timoleon (c.411–c.337 BC), ruler of Syracuse; Dion of Syracuse (408–354 BC), who freed Syracuse from the tyranny of Dionysius II in 356, who returned in 354, when he was expelled again by Timoleon; Nabis, tyrant of Sparta (d. 192 BC); and Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum between 570 and 555 BC. The reference to an evil Dionysius may mean either Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse between 406 and 367 BC, or his son Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse between 367 and 343 BC. Machiavelli’s sources for these examples are primarily Plutarch’s Lives, but mention of Nabis occurs in Polybius and Livy, while Phalaris is noted in Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric.





freely about him: after Caesar’s death Roman emperors used his name as an honorific title, a practice that continued into the twentieth century with the German ‘kaiser’ and the Russian ‘czar’.





what they say about Catiline: Lucius Sergius Catiline (108–62 BC), a conspirator against the Roman republic who was successfully opposed by Cicero (106–43 BC), accounts of Catiline occur in the works of Plutarch, Sallust, and, most importantly, Cicero.





they celebrate his enemy: Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 BC), the assassin of Julius Caesar (not Lucius Junius Brutus of the sixth century BC, one of the legendary founders of the republic after the expulsion of the Tarquin tyrants and the rape of Lucretia).





his very great fortune and ability: in The Prince (XIX: On Avoiding Being Despised and Hated), Machiavelli also singles out Severus (emperor, AD 193–211) as a special case in a discussion of a large group of other emperors, including Marcus Aurelius (121–80), Commodus (180–93), Pertinax (193), Julianus (193), Caracalla (211–17), Macrinus (217–18), Heliogabalus (218–22), Alexander (222–35), and Maximinus (235–38). Machiavelli admires the combination of fortune and ability (virtu), the special quality he praises in The Prince and that he discerns in the life of Severus. The emperors who were assassinated, and therefore considered as evil rulers by Machiavelli, were: Caesar (d. 44 BC), Caligula (d. AD 41), Claudius (d. 54), Nero (d. 68), Galba (d. 69), Otho (d. 69, a suicide), Vitellius (d. 69), Domitian (d. 96), Commodus, Pertinax, Julianus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Heliogabalus, Alexander, and Maximinus. The emperors who died natural deaths were: Augustus (d. 14), Tiberius (d. 37), Vespasian (d. 79), Titus (d. 81), Nerva (d. 98), Trajan (d. 117), Hadrian (d. 138), Antonius Pius (d. 161), Marcus Aurelius (d. 180), and Severus. To arrive at a total of twenty-six emperors during the period under discussion, Machiavelli omits from his list the following individuals who were emperors or co-emperors, if only briefly: Lucius Verus (d. 169), Decimus Clodius Albinus (d. 194), Gaius Pescennius Niger (d. 194), and Geta (d. 212). While Machiavelli’s sources for the Roman emperors of the first century AD were the obvious ones (Tacitus, Suetonius), other, lesser-known works served as his sources in studying the emperors during the second and third centuries from the time of Marcus Aurelius to Maximinus. He certainly knew Herodian’s History of the Empire from the Time of Marcus, originally written in Greek but available in a Latin translation by Angelo Poliziano published in 1493; and he might also have used the Latin collection of emperors’ biographies known as the Augustan History, a work that had become popular by the late Middle Ages.





like to be put in charge: Machiavelli foreshadows Edward Gibbon’s similar opinion of the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius (96–185). In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon remarks: ‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus’ (The Portable Gibbon (New York: Viking Penguin, 1952), 107).





full of new disasters: from this line to the penultimate sentence in the paragraph, Machiavelli paraphrases the famous description of the calamities striking Rome in the year AD 69 that he found in Tacitus’ Histories (i. 2). For the English text, see Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Kenneth Wellesley (New York: Penguin, 1975), 3.





Numa Pompilius as his successor: Numa was reputed to have died in 673 BC. In many ways, his contribution to the Roman republic— the conscious invention of a civic religion as the ethical basis for the political and social fabric of Rome—was even more crucial and lasting than the foundations laid by Romulus.





of the Romans at Cannae: 216 BC.





a close relationship with a nymph: the nymph Egeria, discussed in Livy (i. 19).





any new form whatsoever: here, as he so often does in The Prince, Machiavelli implies that the statesman is an artist, giving form to a shapeless and amorphous political mass, a metaphor that is explained at greater length in the next sentence at the end of this paragraph.





that He bestow it: Dante, The Divine Comedy: Purgatory, trans, and ed. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1985), vii. 121–3. Machiavelli actually misquotes the original Italian (which we modify in English translation), using the verb ‘descend’ rather than ‘rise’. Apparently, he was thinking of a genealogical tree, where branches descend, rather than a real tree, such as Dante had in mind, where the branches rise up.





that he spoke with God: a Dominican preacher born in Ferrara in 1452, Savonarola became Prior of San Marco in Florence in 1491, and was a major force in Florentine politics after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. He was the author of an important political treatise, Treatise on the Organization and Government of Florence (1498), which proposed a republican government for the city and an enlarged grand council based on his interpretation of that branch of the Venetian government. A fierce republican opposed to the Medici family under whose patronage he was first brought to Florence, Savonarola was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI and executed in 1498 in the Piazza della Signoria. Some contemporary scholars believe Machiavelli’s election to the Florentine chancery came about as a result of his opposition to Savonarola’s policies, and the sarcastic tone of his description of Savonarola’s discourse with God certainly shows his dislike of the friar. A letter dated 9 March 1498 from Machiavelli to Ricciardo Becchi, the Florentine envoy at the papal court sent by Piero Soderini’s government, describes in detail several of Savonarola’s sermons, and in the letter Machiavelli describes the friar’s preaching as ‘lies’ (see The Portable Machiavelli, 56–8, for a complete translation of the letter). Machiavelli’s most important remark about Savonarola, of course, comes from the famous discussion of armed prophets (who always succeed) and unarmed prophets like Savonarola (who always fail) in chapter VI of The Prince.





the existence of the pagan religion: in the original Italian, Machiavelli actually employs the word gentile (‘gentile’) rather than pagana (‘pagan’), employing the point of view of the ancient Jews and Christians.





or punishment: it should not be forgotten that Machiavelli was in the process of writing the Discourses on Livy, when Martin Luther’s conflict with the papacy was beginning (his famous ninety-five theses appeared in Wittemberg on 31 October 1517). Luther was often referred to as the ‘punishment’ or ‘scourge’ (il flagello) of the church. The fact that Machiavelli underlines the physical location of Rome as the key to the corruption produced by such geographical proximity shows that he was criticizing the court at Rome and not the Christian religion in this famous passage. The comical paradox arising from the juxtaposition of physical proximity to Rome, the headquarters of the Holy See and, presumably, proximity to God, with moral corruption and great distance from religion’s moral teachings is not original with Machiavelli. It was apparently a proverbial popular belief and is brilliantly exploited for comic effect in Giovanni Boccaccio’s tale of how a Jew was miraculously converted to Christianity when he visited Rome and witnessed the same corruption at the papal court that Machiavelli notes here (The Decameron, i. 2). This chapter also contains an implicit criticism of Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), who held the papacy between 1513 and 15 21 and who was the leader of the Medici faction then ruling Florence. In The Prince, in spite of his republican leanings, Machiavelli had seen the conjunction of Medici power in Florence with the Medici papacy in Rome as an expedient means of driving foreigners out of Italy. Now, in this openly republican commentary, there is no beneficial result that can emerge from a corrupt Roman court.





to bring in someone powerful: Machiavelli assumes that such a powerful man will be a foreigner.





with the aid of the Swiss: here Machiavelli alludes to the League of Cambrai (1508–9) against Venice and to the Holy League (1511–12) against the French, both organized by Pope Julius II.





powerful barbarians: Machiavelli also calls foreign invaders of Italy barbarians at the conclusion of The Prince (XXVI: An Exhortation to Liberate Italy From the Barbarians).





the Romans discovered that Apollo: in 398 BC, according to Livy (v. 15–16), the unusual level of the waters at Lake Albanus caused the Romans to send a delegation to Delphi (the oracle of Apollo) for an interpretation of its significance; meanwhile, an aged soothsayer from Veii informed the Romans that they would not take the city until the water was drained off. When the delegation returned from Delphi and confirmed the old man’s prediction, the Roman soldiers regained their confidence. Although it is not so clearly stated in the Latin original, Machiavelli obviously believes that every form of oracular prediction in Rome was employed and manipulated by its political leaders: recourse to oracles and prophecy is synonymous with fraud and political manipulation in his view of ancient Rome.





because of Terentillus the tribune: according to Livy (iii. 9–10), in 462 BC the consul Gaius Terentillus Arsa proposed that a commission of five men be set up to define and limit the powers of the consuls.





a certain Appius Herdonius: see Livy, iii. 15–18. Appius Herdonius was a Sabine, and the army under his control took the Capitol in 460 BC. Livy mentions an army of 2,500 men, but Machiavelli adds a substantial number to his figure.





a certain Publius Ruberius: Livy (iii. 15) refers not to Publius Ruberius but to Publius Valerius Publicola.





Titus Quinctius was immediately re-elected consul: not Titus Quinctius but Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the man who would later became one of Roman political mythology’s most celebrated characters when, as Roman dictator, he would save the republic after being called away from his farm. Machiavelli also errs in saying that this election was a re-election (he presumably confuses this election with a first re-election that Livy mentions shortly thereafter (iii. 21); the election in question here was his first as consul.





‘to suit its own convenience’: cited in Latin from Livy, iii. 20. For the English text which we cite throughout, see Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin, 1971), 206–7.





they called pullarii: this technical term might be rendered as ‘chicken-keepers’ or ‘poultry-diviners’, neither possibility representing a felicitous phrase in English.





the consul Papirius: Lucius Papirius Cursor the Younger, consul in 293 and 272 BC, defeated the Samnites at the battle of Aquilonia in 293 BC during the third Samnite War (see Livy, x. 40–1).





into the ocean: Machiavelli could not have found this anecdote in Livy, since the complete account in Book XIX is not extant; Livy’s account is mentioned in passing in the extant summary of Book XIX and is also discussed in Polybius (i. 49–51; vi. 52); Machiavelli probably found the story either in Valerius Maximus (i. 4; or v. 3), or in Cicero (De Natura Deorum ii. 3 and 7). Valerius Maximus (vii. 2 and 5) also recounts the story of Papirius Cursor. Machiavelli fails to mention the fact that this battle, fought near modern Trapani in 249 BC, was a naval, not a land, battle.





‘to try for victory’: Machiavelli cites Livy (x. 31) in Latin. For the English text which we cite throughout, see Livy, Rome and Italy, trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin, 1982), 333.





‘painted and gilded’: Livy (x. 39), cited in Latin. For the English text see Livy, Rome and Italy, 344. The Roman general in question is the previously mentioned Lucius Papirius Cursor (Discourses on Livy, i. 14).





for Roman ability: in this sentence and the next, Machiavelli again employs the most important term of The Prince (virtù, meaning exceptional ability, ingenuity, strength, or valour) three times, but the term here is not applied to an individual but to a people and its institutions.





through religion when it is properly used: here, as elsewhere, Machiavelli always considers religion as an instrumentum regni, as a means of bolstering a government’s power; while he personally may believe in the ethical and moral message of the Christian religion, he never hesitates to describe it in the same utilitarian terms that he employs to deal with the pagan religions of classical times.





in the discussion of foreign affairs: that is, in Book II.





who seeks to put it back into chains: Machiavelli was apparently inspired to employ this metaphor of a wild beast for a newly freed people by his readings of Polybius (vi. 9).





its substance is not corrupted: Machiavelli employs the word materia for ‘substance’ or “material’ here, a term related to his concept of the political leader or founder who moulds or gives form to the ‘substance’ of the society he organizes.





enemies rather than friends: In his later Florentine Histories (iii. 1), Machiavelli clarifies the difference between the relatively uncorrupted Roman republican period (the 300–year period between the expulsion of the Tarquins to the advent of the Gracchi) and the corrupted city of Florence. Rome’s conflicts were carried on between the plebeians and the aristocrats without factions, sects, or partisans, which arise when private citizens acquire excessive power, influence, or wealth through private means and employ them for private ends. Factions produce partisans rather than citizens and promote the concentration of power and wealth, two major sources of political corruption. While Machiavelli admired the republican period of Rome, it is difficult to say from his works whether he sincerely believed that republican Florence was sufficiently free of civic corruption to follow the Roman example.





against their native city: while the original Italian, patria, can be rendered as ‘homeland’ or ‘fatherland’, ‘native city’ or ‘native land’ may more accurately reflect Machiavelli’s belief that a citizen’s first loyalty was owed to his or her native city. The negative connotation the term ‘fatherland’ has acquired in this century argues against its usage here.





the people friendly to him: Machiavelli gives his same advice on numerous occasions in The Prince (III, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XIX).





an appropriate example: Machiavelli found the historical information that follows on Clearchus in Justin’s Histories (xvi. 4–5). Heraclea was a Greek city on the Black Sea, where Clearchus ruled for twelve years until his assassination in 353 BC. Several Renaissance editions of Justin’s work existed: after the first Venetian edition of 1470, at least eight more appeared in that city, as well as four in Milan and two each in Rome and Florence (where the first edition saw the light in 1510). In Machiavelli’s time Justin was an early history text for children, and we know from Bernardo Machiavelli’s Ricordi or memoirs that Niccolò’s father borrowed a copy when he was 12 years old. While little read today, and certainly less important than Livy or Tacitus, Justin is cited on several occasions in the Discourses on Livy: i. 16; 26; ii. 10; 28; iii. 6 (twice); and 31.





the greatest satisfaction of the people: the reader should bear in mind how Machiavelli’s discussion of Clearchus parallels a similar action by Cesare Borgia in a celebrated passage in The Prince (VII): ‘And having found the occasion to do this, one morning at Cesena he had Messer Remirro placed on the piazza in two pieces with a block of wood and a bloody sword beside him. The ferocity of such a spectacle left those people satisfied and amazed at the same time’ (The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (The World’s Classics, Oxford, 1984), 26).





to its long-standing tyranny: Machiavelli has once before (i. 10) referred to this pair of good rulers from Greek history (see note to p. 48 above).





Caesar’s race was extinguished: after the death of Nero in AD 68 the family of Augustus became extinct.





he, like the first Brutus: like all republican thinkers, Machiavelli makes much of the contrast in Rome between the ‘first Brutus’, who helped drive out the Tarquin tyrants after the rape of Lucretia, and the ‘second Brutus’, who failed to stop civic corruption within Rome’s republican institutions even though he assassinated Julius Caesar (see note to p. 48). For a consideration of the role of Brutus in Roman mythology, see M. L. Clarke, The Noblest Roman: Marcus Brutus and His Reputation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); William Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (New York: The Free Press, 1983); and Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).





the death of Filippo Visconti: Filippo Maria Visconti (1392–1447; ruler of Milan from 1412 until his death). The short-lived (1447–50) Ambrosian Republic of Milan was unable to maintain freedom in the city after Visconti’s death, and after leading Venetian forces against this republic, Francesco Sforza (1401–66) became the duke of Milan. Machiavelli treats the death of Visconti in his Florentine Histories (vi).





to its former disorders: Epaminondas, the famous Theban general, defeated Spartan troops at two great battles—Leuctra (371 BC) and Mantinea (362), although he lost his life in the latter struggle. Here Machiavelli seems to be following Polybius (vi. 43), who remarks: ‘And indeed, Fortune soon proved that the successes which the Thebans gained at the time were due to the heroism of her leading men, not to the form of her constitution. It is well-known that the predominance of Thebes took its rise, attained its height and ceased with the lives of Pelopidas and Epaminondas, and we must conclude that the hegemony which she enjoyed at that time was the work of her citizens and not of her system of government’ (The Rise of The Roman Empire, 338–9).





in greater detail: see i. 18.





into a body politic: Machiavelli employs the phrase vivere politico.





concerning what Cleomenes did: see i. 9, for Machiavelli’s discussion of Cleomenes, Remus, and Titus.





only with great effort: Machiavelli follows the history of the succession after kings David and Solomon in 2 Chronicles 10, where eleven of the twelve tribes of Israel revolt against Rehoboam to rally to Jeroboam, leaving Rehoboam with a single tribe— one-twelfth rather than one-sixth of the population if we count by tribes.





Bajazet, sultan of the Turks: Bajazet II (1482–1512), conqueror of Croatia, who defeated the Venetians several times at sea and caused Pope Alexander VI in 1500 to urge Christian princes to band together to face the Turkish menace.





his father Mahomet’s labours: Mahomet II (1451–81), known as ‘the Conqueror’, who conquered Constantinople in 1453 as well as Asia Minor, Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, and the Crimea and even landed at Otranto in Italy before turning back from an Italian invasion.





his son Selim: Selim II (1512–20), alive while Machiavelli began writing Discourses on Livy, was the conqueror of the Persians, Kurdistan, Egypt, and Syria; Machiavelli’s predictions about the genius of the Ottoman Turks were accurate, for Selim’s son, Suleiman I (1520—66), reached the outskirts of Budapest in Hungary with his armies before turning back from further European adventures.





after him came Ancus: Ancus Marcius (640–616 BC), Rome’s fourth king, who eventually conquered the Latins when they invaded Roman territory, misled by his peaceful manner.





under the rule of the kings: according to Livy, Rome lived under kings for 244 years (i. 40), roughly equivalent to the period of time it took the republic to reach its zenith of power after its victory over the Carthaginians at the battle of Zama in 202 BC.





to conquer the world: Philip (382–336 BC) was followed by his son Alexander the Great (356–323): the father conquered Greece and the son subsequently conquered most of the known world.





Tullus’ example: Tullus Hostilius, Rome’s third king (673–642 BC).





during the Italian wars: Machiavelli’s ‘recent example’ refers to Henry VII’s invasion of France in 1513; Machiavelli derives the period of roughly thirty years in England by considering the end of the Wars of the Roses (1485) as the last great English military campaign.





the historian who writes about this feat: the historian is Plutarch, who discusses the two rulers Pelopidas (403–364 BC) and Epaminondas (d. 362 BC) in his Lives. See note to p. 67 above.





his shiftless men to arms: a reference to Aeneid, vi. 813–14, cited in Latin (with a variation from Virgil’s text). For a complete English translation see Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1983), 188.





became subjected to the Romans: the famous duel of the two sets of triplets from Rome and Alba is described by Livy (i. 24–6); Mettius was dictator, not king, of Alba.





the decision he took: Livy (i. 27–30) describes the indignation of the Albans and the treachery of Mettius, who was obligated to support Roman troops against the citizens of Fidenae but who held back his troops; after the Roman victory over the Fidenates, Mettius was killed by being torn between two chariots driven in opposite directions. Interestingly enough, Livy expresses his disgust at such inhuman punishment at the end of his account, while Machiavelli passes no such judgement on it.





another unknown route: after the defeat of the French at the battle of Novara in 1513, the French returned to Lombardy in 1515 through the Argentera pass, which was considered too small to be used by a large army and left unguarded by the Swiss troops defending Milan. The reference by Machiavelli to this particular battle indicates that this portion of Discourses on Livy was written no earlier than 1515.





the rich away empty: here Machiavelli confuses a reference from the Magnificat (Luke 1: 53), verses that refer to the Lord and not to David.





Pope Julius II: Giuliano della Rovere, who ruled as Pope Julius II from 1503 to 1513; Machiavelli’s date is in error, since the pope entered Bologna in 1506; the Bentivogli family ruled Bologna from 1401 to that time, with brief interruptions.





Giovampagolo Baglioni: Baglioni (1470–1520) was a soldier of fortune who ruled Perugia from 1500 to 1506 and again from 1513 until his death.





The prudent men: among this group Machiavelli apparently numbered himself, since he was present at this memorable event in the company of the pope and describes it in some detail in his diplomatic correspondence. Julius II entered Perugia on 13 September 1506.





the former: the rape of Lucretia, the wife of L. Tarquinius Collatinus, was the immediate cause of the expulsion of the Tarquin kings and the establishment of a republic in Rome in 509 BC; Collatinus and L. Junius Brutus (the ‘first’ Brutus) became the republic’s first consuls, but Collatinus was eventually forced to go into exile because of the hatred the people felt for the tyrants’ name he bore (Livy i. 2). For a discussion of the history of this myth, see Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation or Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World.





on the Caelian hill: after the exile of Collatinus, Publius Valerius joined Brutus as consul, and when Brutus was killed in battle, Valerius remained sole consul. Livy does not mention any actual exile suffered by Publius Valerius but says, rather, that Valerius wanted to build his home on the Velia, a ridge linking the Palatine to the Esquiline hill. This massive edifice aroused popular suspicion, so Valerius pulled it down and eventually earned such popular support that he became known as Publius Valerius Publicola (‘friend of the people’).





‘is accounted gain’: Tacitus, The Histories (iv. 3), cited in Latin. For the English text see The Histories, 204.





without this open opposition: Cosimo was exiled in 1433 but returned to Florence the following year; although he ruled Florence as if he were a prince, Cosimo never actually held such an official title. Machiavelli discusses Cosimo’s rise to power in his Florentine Histories (especially Books IV and VII).





began to fear Caesar too late: Cicero’s Letters To His Friends (xvi. 11).





‘takes no harm ‘: Machiavelli cites this formulaic pronouncement in the original Latin. It is found in Livy, iii. 4 (for this English translation, see Livy, The Early History of Rome, 187).





deprived Rome of its liberty: the decemvirate, as this rule by ten citizens was called in Livy (iii. 32–44) lasted a very short time (451–450 BC); the ten citizens were dominated by Appius Claudius. Livy considers the delegation of power by the consuls to the decemvirs to be a constitutional upheaval equal to the expulsion of the Tarquin kings from Rome.





material that is not corrupt: see note to p. 62.





creates friends and partisans: see note to p. 62.





these previously mentioned decemvirs: Machiavelli will examine the decemvirate in detail in i. 40–5.





a saying of ancient writers: if Machiavelli is citing specific authors (which is doubtful here), no modern editors have found his classical sources. It is more likely that he is strengthening the pedigree of his argument here by attributing the theory he is about to present to a classical tradition.





and the exaltation of another: in only a few brief lines, Machiavelli outlines a number of key theoretical ideas concerning political psychology, political economy, and political conflict. Human desire is limitless (a product of nature and a given in human psychology), but the object of such desire is limited (economics teaches that resources and wealth are scarce); given the conflict of human nature and human economics, political conflict is the natural and inevitable result.





two principal provisions: Machiavelli’s historical explanations here are somewhat confusing. The first agrarian law mentioned by Livy (ii. 41) is that passed in 486 BC by the consul Spurius Cassius, who intended to assign captured lands to the plebeians; patrician objections to this plan were so strenuous that when the consul’s term of office expired, he was indicted for seeking to become king and was subsequently executed. Machiavelli’s description of the agrarian laws here seems closer to the laws proposed by C. Licinius and L. Sextius in 367 BC, which prohibited any citizen from holding more than 500 jugera of such public land (a juger being the amount of land a yoke (juger) of oxen could plough in a day). This issue would be capable of arousing political passions in Rome for many years to come: one of the controversial reforms proposed by the tribunes Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Caius Gracchus in 133 BC was the revival of the Licinian law of 367 BC. Gracchus modified the law, allowing a father with one son to hold an extra 250 jugera and an additional 250 jugera if he had a second son, for a total of 1,000. All families holding more than 1,000 jugera or individuals with more than 500 were to lose the surplus without compensation if they had purchased the extra land. The legislation was thus too ‘retroactive’, in Machiavelli’s view, because it failed to adapt an old law to new and different circumstances: the proof of this lay in the fact that when Gracchus was nominated for the tribune the year afterwards, a riot ensued in which he and several hundred citizens were killed. Machiavelli takes most of these details from Plutarch’s account of the Gracchi in his Lives.





in Antium: Antium (modern Anzio) was captured in 467 BC. See Livy, iii. 1.





on three other occasions: Marius was first elected consul in 107 BC, then five times in a row from 104 to 100; the final occasion was in 88, in opposition to Sulla.





turned to favour Sulla: L. Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BC), head of the aristocratic faction in Rome; after overcoming Marius and Cinna, Sulla remained in control of Rome until he stepped down from power in 79, a year before his death.





came out the winner: Pompey was defeated at the battle of Pharsalus and killed in Egypt in 48 BC.





Duke Valentino: Cesare Borgia(1475–1507), son of Pope Alessandro VI, who was named duke of Valentinois in 1498 by the French king, and who held Romagna and much of central Italy until the pope’s death in 1503. For Machiavelli’s judgement of this historical figure, see The Prince (VII), an evaluation based upon his earlier diplomatic letters and several minor political treatises, in particular A Description of the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and Others (1503), or On the Method of Dealing with the Rebellious Peoples of the Valdichiana (1503). Borgia is always held up by Machiavelli as the most useful model of the ‘new’ prince who gains power with the assistance of others (in this case, the help of his father). For a consideration of the figure of Cesare Borgia in Machiavelli’s writings, see Peter Bondanella, Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974).





had taken Faenza: Faenza fell to Borgia on 26 April 1501.





to come to terms with him: Bologna’s ruler, Giovanni Bentivogli, was forced to cede to Borgia troops and fortified positions on 29 April 1501.





and left in disgrace: on 30 June the French troops tried to breach the city walls but withdrew when they began to take casualties; after the Swiss mercenaries in their ranks rebelled over a pay dispute, the French lifted the siege on 10 July.





Signoria: the Signoria was Florence’s most important city-state governmental body and was controlled by the wealthy members of the major city guilds. Its members were elected for brief terms and were eventually housed together in one of the city’s most famous landmarks—the Palazzo della Signoria, better known after the sixteenth century as the Palazzo Vecchio—in the centre of Florence.





the magistracy of the Ten: Machiavelli knew a great deal about this particular Florentine institution, since he served as its secretary.





Terentillus, a tribune: Gaius Terentillus Arsa in 462 BC (Livy, iii. 9).





they re-created the consuls: from 448 to 368 BC, consuls generally were substituted by tribunes with consular powers; such tribunes with consular power were abolished by the Licinian law of 367 BC, which opened the consulate to the plebeians.





base Roman laws upon them: Livy (iii. 31) says the Romans sent Spurius Postumius Albus, Aulus Manlius, and Publius Sulpicius Camerinus to Athens.





a shrewd but restless man: Appius Claudius and the other decemvirs were appointed in 451 BC.





lictors . . . as their leader: lictors were attendants who carried the fasces (a bundle of wooden rods and a single-headed axe), the symbol of magisterial authority. Roman consuls had twelve of these lictors who announced their approach, cleared a path for them, and carried out their orders to summon, arrest, and even to execute.





‘without some ulterior motive’: cited in Latin from Livy, iii. 3 5. For this and the following quotations, see Livy, The Early History of Rome, 222–4.





‘to liberty for all’: Livy, iii. 37, cited in Latin; Livy’s text is actually somewhat different from the text Machiavelli cites, and in the English translation reads: ‘The decemvirs’ young toadies were easily corrupted by such pay, and, far from making any attempt to check their masters’ brutal conduct, openly rejoiced in it; for them, personal immunity in crime was a more agreeable thing than national liberty.’ The Early History of Rome, 224.





the Sabines and the Volscians: Machiavelli’s memory fails him here, for Livy says that the Sabines and the Aequi attacked Rome (iii. 38).





in particular Valerius and Horatius: Lucius Valerius Potitus and Marcus Horatius Barbatus (Livy, iii. 39).





Mons Sacer: a hill near Rome, just beyond the Anio River.





Nabis, tyrant of Sparta: Nabis was king of Sparta from 206 to 192 BC. Machiavelli underlines the importance of the support of the people in a prince’s defence of his rule in The Prince (IX).





King Ferdinand: either Ferdinand the Catholic (Ferdinand II of Aragon, 1474–1516), or Ferdinand I of Aragon, ruler of Naples from 1458 until 1494.





‘so bitterly to hate’: Livy, iii. 53, cited in Latin. See The Early History of Rome, 242. A more literal translation would be: ‘In condemning cruelty, you rush to act cruelly.’





After 1494: in 1494 the Florentines sent the Medici family into exile and restored a broader republican form of government, which in its initial stages was heavily influenced by Girolamo Savonarola’s followers and the friar’s political ideas.





five citizens: Bernardo del Nero, Niccolò Ridolfi, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, Giannozzo Pucci, and Giovanni Cambi were arrested for plotting to bring Piero de’ Medici back to power and were executed in 1497.





an edict: Livy (iii. 59) discusses this edict issued in 449 BC.





his precise words: Machiavelli’s entire discussion in this chapter refers to Livy’s remarks in iii. 56: ‘True moderation in the defense of political liberties is indeed a difficult thing: pretending to want fair shares for all, every man raises himself by depressing his neighbor; our anxiety to avoid oppression leads us to practice it ourselves; the injustice we repel, we visit in turn upon others, as if there were no choice except either to do it or to suffer it’ (The Early History of Rome, 257).





‘good beginnings’: See Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline, 51.





‘when the fight is over’: Machiavelli cites Livy’s text (iv. 6) in Latin, with some variations. See The Early History of Rome, 276–7.





‘in one single man’: cited in Latin from Livy, iv. 6. See The Early History of Rome, 277.





inside the palace: the Curia in the Roman Forum.





‘find in them’: unlike most of the quotations that are taken directly from Livy in the original Latin, in this case Machiavelli creates his own Italian speech from material he found in Livy’s original (xiii. 2–4). Livy criticizes Pacuvius as a demagogue and a manipulator intent upon building his own personal power, however, and does not recount the story as a positive example. Machiavelli, incidentally, calls the character Pacuvius Calanus, whereas his true name was Pacuvius Calavius Campanus.





when they created the censors: in 443 BC.





the dictator: Manlius Aemilius Mamercus, military tribune and dictator in 433 BC.





either the historian was incomplete: this criticism of Livy’s reliability as a historian is unusual in Machiavelli and demonstrates that, unlike some of his humanist predecessors, he could cast a critical eye on his source. Contrast, in Inferno, xxviii. 12, Dante’s remark: ‘as Livy’s history tells, that does not err’ (Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1984), 325).





by the powerful citizens: in his Florentine Histories (i. 5), Machiavelli recounts that in 1250 Florence created two foreign judges: one called the ‘Captain of the People’, the other the ‘Podestà’. In fact, the second office was in existence before 1250.





ten citizens: this occurred in 1310.





the Council of Forty: the Quarantìa functioned as a kind of supreme court and was first established in 1179 and therefore predates the Council of the Ten. After the closing of the Great Council in 1296, which limited participation in the government, the Quarantìa was assigned the crucial task of determining which of the Venetian inhabitants by right belonged to this oligarchic establishment and could be considered citizens.





Council of the Pregadi: the Council of the Pregadi or the Pregai was a senate of sixty members which served as an advisory body when ‘requested’ (pregadi) by the Doge to render judgements for the Grand Council.





were consuls: 431 BC.





served him best: for a detailed discussion about the various ways patrician opponents reacted to Cosimo’s power and Machiavelli’s critique of Cosimo’s enforced exile in 1433, see Florentine Histories, iv. 27–8.





came to ruin: see note to p. 23.





Hirtius and Pansa: after the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, Mark Antony was declared a public enemy and the two consuls, C. Vibius Pansa and A. Hirtius, waged war upon his army, defeating him at the battle of Mutina in 43 BC but dying in the struggle. Cicero urged the senate to give command of the army to Octavian, but when Octavian fell out with the senate and came to a reconciliation with Mark Antony through the mediation of Lepidus, the three men formed the triumvirate that was to govern for the next five years. One of Mark Antony’s demands for this agreement was the execution of Cicero, whose head and hands were displayed in the Roman Forum.





to their life: Machiavelli confuses On Monarchy with Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet), i. 11.





before their downfall: Machiavelli refers to the League of Cambrai, formed on 10 December 1508 by the pope, the emperor, the king of France, the duke of Savoy, the duke of Ferrara, and the marquis of Mantua against the Venetians, who had refused to return territory taken from the duke of Ferrara at the request of Pope Julius II; the Venetians were excommunicated and suffered a major military defeat at the battle of Agnadello on 14 May 1509 (see note to p. 37 above), which curtailed their power on the Italian mainland for an entire decade until the league members began to quarrel among themselves.





the fall of Rome: Quintus Fabius Maximus was made consul in 217 BC, and his master of the horse was Marcus Minucius Rufus. ‘Fabian’ or delaying tactics have ever since described the Roman consul’s cautious but successful policy of refusing to give Hannibal the opportunity of a victory in the field by wearing him down on foreign soil. When the Romans preferred to act with their usual impetuosity and failed to follow the advice of Fabius, disaster ensued: in 216 BC Varro and his army were routed at the battle of Cannae, with enormous casualties on the Roman side.





were routed and killed: in 212 BC, in an attempt to lift the siege of Capua, a foolhardy centurion named Marcus Centennius Paenula offered to attack Hannibal with volunteers but was immediately destroyed by Carthaginian forces (Livy, XXV. 19).





Nicias: an Athenian general (470–413 BC) described in Plutarch’s Lives, where he is compared to the unlucky Roman general Crassus, who perished in Parthia in 53 BC.





please the people: the arguments of Fabius Maximus and Scipio Africanus (the latter of whom prevailed in this instance) may be found outlined in lengthy speeches in Livy, xxviii. It is important to note that Machiavelli praises both Fabius Maximus and Scipio Africanus because their personality traits (temporizing in the first case and bold impetuosity in the second) were successful when the times in question required them. The obvious difficulty lies in discerning exactly when a particular character trait is in tune with the times.





of the commander: after taking Torre a San Vincenzo in the Maremma on 17 August 1505, Florentine troops besieged Pisa unsuccessfully.





among the people: for a detailed account of this incident, see Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Florence, Book XXVI.





‘Willing to stop and listen’: Virgil, Aeneid, i. 151–2 (p. 8 of the Fitzgerald translation).





the Arrabbiati: the Frateschi or Piagnoni (‘Weepers’) were the followers of Savonarola, while the Arrabbiati (‘Enraged’) opposed the friar’s policies.





Francesco: 1453–1524; one of the staunch supporters of Savonarola.





to go to Veil: a proposed immigration to Veii was discussed in Discourses on Livy, i. 53; Machiavelli originally found mention of this in Livy, v. 51–5.





into Italy: in his Lenten sermons in 1492 Savonarola warned the Florentines of a ‘new Cyrus’ who would march through Italy without any opposition; Charles VIII, king of France from 148 3 to 1498, invaded Italy in 1494 and rapidly became master of Naples by May 1494; returning to France, he was blocked by the Holy League, an alliance of Italian states (principally Venice with Milanese troops) at Fornovo (6 July 1495), a battle from which Charles emerged victorious and continued his march back to France. At Fornovo the Italians lost their best opportunity to keep foreigners out of their territory during the early sixteenth century.





Lorenzo de’ Medici the elder: therefore not Lorenzo the Duke of Urbino (d. 1519), to whom The Prince was eventually dedicated, but the more famous Lorenzo il Magnifico (d. 1492).





by lightning: according to contemporary chronicles, this occurred on 4 November 1511.





coming to Rome: this story may be found in Livy, v. 32.





‘for himself’: Livy, vi. 4, cited in Latin but from an edition that is substantially different from the modern critical edition in this passage. See Livy, Rome and Italy, 42.





to save themselves: see Livy, i. 50–1; earlier (Discourses on Livy, i. 44) Machiavelli cites the example of Virginia in discussing how a crowd is useless without a leader.





‘regretted their loss’: Livy, vi. 20, cited in Latin. See Rome and Italy, 64.





‘a cruel master’: Livy, xxiv. 25, cited in Latin. For the English text which we cite throughout, see Livy, The War With Hannibal: Books XXI-XXX of ‘The History of Rome from its Foundation’, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin, 1965), 262.





as Herod did with Mariamne: Cleitus, some twenty years older than Alexander, and whose sister had been the young ruler’s wet-nurse, saved Alexander’s life at the battle of Granicus in 334 BC, but some years later at a banquet he expressed the Macedonians’ dissatisfaction with what they felt was an endless series of wars fought only for Alexander’s glory. This incensed Alexander who killed him with a spear in a fit of anger but was immediately so sorry for his deed that his own men had to prevent him from committing suicide. See Plutarch’s Lives for the details. Mariamne (or Marianne, as Machiavelli actually writes her name) was the wife of Herod the Great, king of Judea from 40 to 4 BC, who put his wife to death in 29 BC in a fit of anger but later repented his hasty deed. Machiavelli probably found this story in Josephus’ The Jewish War (Book I).





less ungrateful than princes: see Discourses on Livy, i. 29.





his entire army: Demetrius (337–283 BC), called Poliorecetes or Conqueror of Cities, was king of Macedonia between 294 and 283 BC. For details, see Plutarch, Lives.





he was killed by him: after the defeat of Pompey (106–48 BC) at the battle of Pharsalus, Pompey took refuge with Ptolemy XII, whose father he had been instrumental in restoring to the throne of Egypt, but Romans in the king’s employ murdered Pompey as he prepared to speak to the king.





Saguntum in Spain: Saguntum was faithful to its alliance with Rome but was captured in 218 BC by Hannibal (see Livy, xxi).





completely rejected it for that reason: this incident is recounted in Plutarch’s Lives, but some scholars believe that Machiavelli may have read of it in Cicero’s De officiis (On duties) (iii. 49).





‘not of birth’: Machiavelli’s version of this speech (given in Latin) is briefer but more dramatic than the original in Livy (vii. 32). The complete text in English translation is: ‘But today the consulship is open to all, to us patricians and to you plebeians, and is the reward not of birth, as before, but of merit’ (Livy, Rome and Italy, 141).





on another occasion: Discourses on Livy, i. 6.





argued elsewhere: in Discourses on Livy, i. 6.





entered Italy and Rome: in tracing the evolution of exceptional ability (virtù) through the ancient world, Machiavelli skips over Greece.





the Roman empire of the east: in this passage Machiavelli refers to the people commanded by Charlemagne, the Mameluks of Egypt, and the Swiss as well as the Germans (Germany in Machiavelli’s works always includes the free cities of Switzerland). The Saracen ‘sect’ is, of course, Islam, but it was the Ottoman Turks who finally destroyed the Byzantine Empire.





human appetites are insatiable: Machiavelli’s political theory rests upon a fundamental chain of logic: a psychological principle (human nature cannot be satiated) conflicts with an economic fact (scarce resources), resulting in a political situation (conflict is universal and inevitable). Nowhere in his various political writings does this association of human psychology and political economy emerge more clearly than in this passage.





the expansion of their empire: the reader is reminded that Machiavelli understands the Roman republic’s establishment of an empire as one of its most positive attributes and that republicanism (not democracy) is his preferred political credo.





Ability or Fortune?: in The Prince, Machiavelli discussed the relationship of virtù and fortuna in the character of the individual political leader; now he turns to consider the relationship of the two concepts in the operation of a model political system from the ancient world.





Plutarch, a most authoritative writer: in his Moralia Plutarch discusses several arguments to support the idea that Rome rose to power because of fortune’s favours rather than through ability.





on principalities: see Machiavelli, The Prince, chapters III-V, for a discussion of the conditions under which various occupations of foreign territory by the Romans and other modern rulers occurred.





of the Capuans: Livy (vii. 29–32) discusses how the Sidicini, attacked by the Samnites, appealed to the Capuans, who in turn appealed to Rome when they found themselves in military difficulty around 340 BC.





of the Camertines: the alliance of the Romans and the Camertines against the Etruscans took place around 310 BC (Livy, ix. 36).





of the Mamertines: originally mercenary troops employed by Agathocles in Sicily, the Mamertines seized Messina in 289 BC; after being threatened by the Carthaginians in 264 BC, they asked Rome for help, thereby bringing about the First Punic War (264–241 BC), which Livy treated in a section of his history of Rome, Books XVI-XIX, subsequently lost to posterity. Machiavelli, however, would have found the cause of this war discussed in Polybius (i. 8).





of the Saguntines: see Livy, xxi. 6, for a discussion of how Saguntum, attacked by Hannibal in 219 BC, appealed to Rome before being captured by the Carthaginians; the city was recovered in 212 BC by Gnaeus, brother of Publius Cornelius Scipio, the father of Scipio Africanus (Livy, xxiv. 42).





with that of Masinissa: Masinissa, the king of Numidia, deserted Carthage and joined the Romans in 204 BC when they invaded Africa, recovering his kingdom in 203 BC after the defeat of Syphax.





of the Aetolians: in 211 BC (Livy, xxvi. 24; see also The Prince, III). The Romans formed an alliance with the Aetolian League against Philip of Macedonia, an act that eventually led to Roman occupation of the Greek peninsula.





and other Asian princes: in 193 BC Eumenes II, king of Pergamum, encouraged the Romans to wage war upon Antiochus and was eventually given vast dominions in Asia as his reward (Livy, xxxvii. 37–45).





the Massilienses and the Aedui: the Massilienses, natives of Massilia (modern Marseilles) were Greeks living in southern France who aided the Romans in the Second Punic War, and subsequently appealed to Rome for assistance in both 154 and 125 BC. The Aedui, a Gallic tribe, were Julius Caesar’s closest ally during his Gallic campaigns.





throughout the provinces: Machiavelli believed that truly free cities like those he discerned in antiquity existed only outside of Italy in Germany (which, for Machiavelli, also included Switzerland). Note that his use of the word ‘province’ refers to Roman provinces.





from the tyranny of Pisistratus: roughly from 510 BC until Athens fell under Spartan domination in 404 BC.





Xenophon’s treatise entitled ‘On Tyranny’: the Hiero, a Socratic dialogue on tyranny, featured Hiero of Syracuse, a historical figure frequently mentioned by Machiavelli, as one of its interlocutors. The work was translated into Latin during the Quattrocento by Leonardo Bruni.





under the debris: this occurred around 425 BC on the island of Corfu.





to take away from you: here, as elsewhere in Machiavelli’s theoretical works, the writer shifts from the abstract consideration of political events to an intimate, more personal address to his reader.





the pagans: see note to p. 53.





by Roman skill: Livy (x. 31) arrives at the figure of forty-six years by counting the forty-eight years from 343 to 295 BC minus two years of truce. After the First (343–341), Second (326–304), and Third Samnite Wars (298–293), which concluded with the decisive Roman victories at Sentinum (295) and Aquilonia (293), the Samnites became part of Rome.





‘in the size of Rome’: cited in Latin from Livy, i. 30. See Livy, The Early History of Rome, 67. Some of Machiavelli’s modern commentators believe that the location of such a Latin quotation from Livy at the beginning of a chapter may reflect a remnant of the early purpose of his Discourses on Livy, a strict commentary upon the Latin text, rather than the more complicated political treatise the intended commentary eventually became.





its sixth king: Servius Tullius (Livy, i. 44).





so that the sap: here Machiavelli employs the word virtù to refer to the sap within a healthy plant. Normally, this key concept in Machiavelli’s political theory must be translated as ingenuity, strength, exceptional ability, and only rarely (if ever) as ‘virtue’.





use only leather money: Seneca (De Beneficiis, v. 14) states that the Spartans were obliged to pay their debts either in gold or in leather bearing an official stamp. In the biography of Lycurgus in Plutarch’s Lives, the historian claims that the ruler introduced a large iron coin too bulky to carry off in any great quantity.





‘in the size of Rome’: here Machiavelli repeats the original Latin sentence found in Livy, i. 30 (see note to p. 161 above). Sucharepetition in the body of a chapter implies that this particular section of the work was probably never extensively revised in Machiavelli’s transition from a strict commentary on Livy to a political treatise on republics only occasioned, in part, by Livy’s history.





Diodorus Siculus: the author of a universal history in Greek, covering mythological times to 60 BC. In spite of its fragmentary condition, the Bibliotheke (‘Library’) is the most extensively preserved of all classical historical works by a Greek author. Diodorus settled in Rome c. 56 BC and had completed his history by 30 BC.





in our system, of ...: in Livy (v. 30), the text reads septena iugera, but a variant text (apparently employed by Machiavelli) also reads terna iugera et septunces. Machiavelli left this passage unfinished, meaning to return to it eventually, filling in the modern equivalents in Italian measurements. According to some estimates, the amount is roughly 1 hectare or 2.471 acres.





for their safety: the closing paragraph of Sallust’s Jugurthine War (xiv) discusses how Rome’s terrified reaction to the military defeats of two Roman consuls at the battle of Arausio produced this special fear of the Gauls (actually Sallust incorrectly identifies as ‘Gauls’ two other tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones).





against Rome: this siege of Rome took place in 390 BC.





200,000 Gauls: Livy’s record of the second Gallic War (226–222 BC) is lost. While the casualties were enormous in this war, Machiavelli may be confusing these figures with estimates associated with casualties from the invasion of the Teutonian and Cimbric tribes that the Roman general Marius annihilated at the battle of Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, which Machiavelli mentions in the next sentence.





from Syria: the exploits of Belisarius, the Byzantine warrior who defeated the Vandals in AD 534 are described in the Gothic Wars by his secretary, the Greek historian Procopius. Machiavelli cites in Latin from the translation De bello italico adversus Gothos (iv. 10).





which they had come: According to Livy (i. 1), Aeneas was welcomed by the Latin king in Italy; Procopius and Justinian (xviii. 5) describe how Dido founded Carthage with the consent of her African neighbours. The Massilienses were Greeks settlers who reportedly founded the ancient city which eventually became Marseilles in France. According to popular legend, they were welcomed by the area’s original inhabitants.





inhabitants of Capua: that is, the Campanians mentioned earlier.





who was attacking them: after their defeat at the battle of Altopascio in 1325 by Castruccio Castracani, lord of Lucca, the Guelph government in Florence gave the duke of Calabria (the son of King Robert of Naples) the signoria of the city for a period of ten years, although he died in 1328. For Machiavelli’s biography of Castruccio Castracani, shaped by both stylistic means and changes in historical facts to make him the archetypal Renaissance prince, see The Life of Castruccio Castracani in The Portable Machiavelli, 518–47.





without fighting: we know very little about Quintus Curtius Rufus except that he was the author of a life of Alexander the Great, several editions of which existed in Renaissance Italy after its initial discovery in 1470. The available critical edition of this text, however, lacks precisely the episode in question, the rebellion of Agis III, king of Sparta, against Antipater, one of Alexander’s generals, whose death in 331 BC occurred not a few days before the news of Alexander’s death reached Greece, as Machiavelli claims, but some eight years before. Machiavelli may have been reading a now-lost Renaissance manuscript in which this lacuna did not exist.





in the war over Urbino: in 1476 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, was defeated by the Swiss and killed; the pope in question is Leo X (1513–21), a member of the Medici family. This particular passage is important for the dating of the composition of the Discourses on Livy, since we know that Francesco Maria della Rovere had regained control of Urbino in September 1517 after that duchy had been given in August 1516 by Pope Leo X to his nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the duke of Urbino (1491–1519), the same person to whom Machiavelli dedicated the final edition of The Prince between 1516 and 1519.





in their defence: the Venetians lost many of their possessions on the mainland after the battle of Agnadello in 1509 (see notes to pp. 37, 130).





that Spartan king: Machiavelli returns to his previous example of Agis III, king of Sparta (see note to p. 177 above).





as happened to Hasdrubal: in 207 BC, according to Livy (xxvii. 48), Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, made this fateful decision, which cost him his life, when he engaged the troops of the two Roman consuls on the Metaurus River.





without ever mentioning money: Livy’s famous discussion of Alexander the Great and the Romans may be found in ix. 17–18. His conclusion is that Rome would have triumphed over Alexander the Great.





if they wished to save themselves: see Livy, vii. 30.





‘to protect their allies’: cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 29, this remark is also paraphrased by Machiavelli in Latin two additional times in this chapter. See Livy, Rome and Italy, 135.





‘than actual strength’: in 1478 Pope Sixtus IV placed Florence under an interdict following the repression by the Medici of the Pazzi Conspiracy; papal forces commanded by Alfonso, eldest son of Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Naples, and Federico da Montefeltro, lord of Urbino, invaded Tuscany before Lorenzo de’ Medici sued for peace by going to Rome. Machiavelli discusses this war in Florentine Histories, viii. 10–18.





Maximilian the emperor: the Habsburg ruler reigned from 1493 until his death on 12 January 1519, and since Machiavelli speaks of him as if he were alive in this passage, this internal evidence suggests that this part of the Discourses on Livy was composed before 1519.





the Capuans offered to the Sidicini: since Capua was the major city of Campania, the Capuans are the same Campanians mentioned by Machiavelli in the first sentence of this chapter.





also cite the example of Agathocles: this tyrant ruled Syracuse from 316 to 289 BC, and is cited by Machiavelli in his famous discussion in The Prince (IX) as the perfect example of a ruler who came to power through wickedness, in the ancient world.





and lost their liberty: according to Thucydides (vii. 82–7), the Athenian army invaded Sicily in 415 BC during the seventeenth year of the Peloponnesian War, and was either destroyed in the field or made prisoner in several campaigns it lost to Syracuse, resulting in the decline of Athens as a major power in the Greek world.





from the earth: the Labours of Hercules (discussed in Apol-lodorus, ii. 5 and Diodorus Siculus, iv), include Hercules’s wrestling match with Antaeus, the Libyan giant who was the son of Poseidon and Ge. The image of Hercules wrestling with Antaeus became well known in the Renaissance, particularly on medals. ‘Hercules the Egyptian’ (Ercole Egizio) might refer to the fact that this encounter took place while he was crossing North Africa (in the legend his next act is the slaying of Busiris, king of Egypt), and could be taken to mean ‘Hercules in Egypt’.





along with his state: Naples had five kings between 1494 and 1496: Ferdinando I, who ruled from 1458 until his death in 1494; his son Alfonso II, who succeeded his father in 1494 and abdicated in 1495, dying at the end of that year; Alfonso’s son, Ferdinando II, who ruled for several months in 1495 and again for several months in 1496, when he died; Charles VIII of Anjou, the king of France, who captured Naples in February of 1495 and held it until July of the same year (he died in 1498); and finally Frederick, the son of Ferdinando I, who ruled Naples from 1496 until 1501, when he was deposed and succeeded by Louis XII of France.





in those nearby: Castruccio Castracani waged war on Florence in 1325 (see Florentine Histories, ii. 29–30), forcing the Florentines to seek the support of King Robert of Naples and the protection of his son Charles, duke of Calabria, who came to the city with troops to defend it against Castruccio. Florence waged war against Gian-galeazzo Visconti, lord of Milan from 1385 until 1402, but never succeeded in deposing him from power in Milan (see Florentine Histories, iii. 25).





1,800,000 armed men: this figure may be an error; 800,000 armed men would be more likely a total, even though it, too, seems exaggerated.





they destroyed the Cimbri: the Romans annihilated the Cimbri at the battle of Campi Raudii in 101 BC (the battle took place on a field between the modern cities of Turin and Milan).





Messer Bernarbò: Giangaleazzo Visconti seized control of Milan in 1385 and was made first duke of Milan.





forced to come to terms: according to Livy (vii. 33–7), the Romans defeated the Samnites at Mount Gaurus and Suessela in 343 BC during the First Samnite War (343–341).





‘a fair treaty, etc. ‘: Livy, viii. 4, cited in Latin. See Livy, Rome and Italy, 161.





‘with their own?’: Livy, viii. 4, cited in Latin but abbreviated somewhat. See Rome and Italy, 161.





‘our plans in order’: Livy, viii. 4, cited in Latin. See Rome and Italy, 161.





to result from it: Hieronymus was murdered in 215 BC; although Apollonides advised the Syracusans to continue their half-century alliance with Rome, they decided to throw their lot in with Carthage in 214 BC (see Livy, xxiv. 28). The result was the famous siege of Syracuse by Marcellus, in which Livy describes the invaluable assistance of the scientist Archimedes to the Syracusan cause. Syracuse finally fell to Rome in 212 BC.





‘with the Roman people’: Machiavelli cites this passage from Livy (viii. 11), but translates it himself into Italian rather than quoting the original Latin as he so often does elsewhere in the Discourses on Livy. This suggests that he may have ultimately intended to translate all the Latin passages he includes in his text before a final draft was completed.





against Ludovico, duke of Milan: after Louis XII became king of France in 1498, he also assumed the title of duke of Milan, and with the support of the Venetians and Pope Alexander VI he invaded Italy in 1499, seizing Milan in September of that year from Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro. Ludovico attempted to retake the city from the French in 1500 but was captured at the battle of Novara and died in captivity in 1508. He is best known for his patronage of Leonardo da Vinci as well as for having been the instigator of the disastrous foreign invasions of Italy that destroyed its independence at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The causes of these invasions and their calamitous results provide Machiavelli with a primary motivation for writing about politics, not only in the Discourses on Livy but also in The Prince, The Art of War, and the Florentine Histories.





for a similar reason: besides losing the goodwill of their French ally, Florence was obliged to pay the French a large sum (25,000 gold florins) that they had owed to the Duchy of Milan. Machiavelli refers here to the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512, which he and others attributed to the vacillation of its executive officer, Piero Soderini, for whom Machiavelli served as an assistant.





in another chapter: Discourses on Livy, i. 38.





the other killed his son: as reported by Livy (viii. 3–10), the two consuls Titus Manlius Torquatus and Publius Decius Mus decided that, because the two armies engaged in battle were so similar, no private combat without specific orders was permitted on pain of death, and that if either flank commanded by a consul were to give way, that consul would sacrifice himself to restore discipline. The flank commanded by Publius Decius did give way and he threw himself into the battle to meet his death. Titus Manlius Torquatus ordered his own son to be executed for disobeying the orders against single combat even though he had emerged victorious. The second example of stern Roman discipline became famous after Livy’s report of it and found expression in many works of Renaissance art of republican inspiration. See Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World, for a discussion of this tradition.





had its own cavalry: Leslie J. Walker’s commentary on the Discourses on Livy suggests that these terms are of Etruscan origin and can be rendered by the contemporary terms ‘Vanguard’, ‘second line’, and ‘rear guard’. For his discussion, see Leslie J. Walker (ed.), The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), ii. 118.





‘our last card’: see Livy, viii. 8.





than in depth: at the battle of Ravenna, fought on 11 April 1512, French forces led by Gaston de Foix emerged victorious against the armies of the Holy League (Spain, the pope, Venice), but the bloody cost of the victory and the loss of the French general soon led Louis XII to abandon Italy.





called giornate: a gallicism, journées or days.





and fatti d’arme: feats of arms.





from sword wounds and not from cannon shot: Count Ludovico died in 1509; Louis d’Armagnac, the duke de Nemours and French viceroy of Naples, was killed in 1503 at the battle of Cerignola, where Spanish troops defeated the French and took possession of Neapolitan territory.





against Sophy and the Sultan: the ‘Turk’ refers to Selim I (Sultan of Turkey from 1512 to 1520), who defeated the Shah of Persia (Sophy), Ismail I, in 1514, and the Mameluk sultan (the ‘Sultan’) of Egypt and Syria in 1516.





near Lake Regillus: this battle of 496 BC is described in Livy, ii. 20.





‘in chains’: Livy, xxii. 49; this is an unusual passage, since Machiavelli both cites the Latin original (albeit in a slightly altered form) and then provides an Italian translation in the text itself. The battle of Cannae took place in 216 BC.





some twenty-five years ago: it is possible that the text of the Discourses on Livy is corrupted at this point, since elsewhere (The Prince, XII; Florentine Histories, v) Machiavelli dates the origins of mercenary soldiers in Italy as far earlier than a mere two-and-one-half decades before the composition of this work (see Giorgio Inglese’s note in Discorsi, 430).





north of Milan: the battle of Novara took place on 6 June 1513; this battle of Marignano took place on 13 September 1515. Machiavelli fails to mention a crucial fact about the lack of Swiss cavalry: after their defeat of the French at Novara, because the Swiss lacked cavalry to pursue the routed French forces the French army escaped complete destruction.





remained alive: Filippo Visconti, duke of Milan from 1402 until 1447, employed Count Francesco Bussone, known as Il Carmignuola, as his mercenary commander until 1424; the battle in question is that of Arbedo, fought in 1422. After passing from service with the Visconti to that of his Venetian enemy, Bussone was eventually executed in 1432 by the Venetians, who suspected him of double dealing. In the nineteenth century a famous tragedy based upon this mercenary soldier’s life was written by Alessandro Manzoni.





may bring him strength and prestige: here the Italian uses ‘him’ rather than ‘them’; it is not uncommon for Machiavelli to shift from the plural to the singular and vice versa; indeed, such sudden grammatical shifts, such as moving from an abstract statement ‘one must...’) to a direct address to the reader (‘you must...’), are typical of the rhetorical style of his greatest prose works. In general, we have translated such passages so as to read correctly in English.





how Lucullus: Machiavelli relies on Plutarch’s Lives for this description of a battle fought against Tigranes, king of Armenia, in 69 BC near Tigranocerta. Plutarch says, however, that Tigranes lost 150,000 infantry and 55,000 mounted soldiers, not 150,000 cavalry.





called the Swiss: the first Swiss confederation was formed in 1291 by the cantons of Uri, Schwytz, and Unterwalden.





‘forgot their homeland’: Livy, vii. 38, cited in Latin. See Livy, Rome and Italy, 149.





‘avenging the conquered world’: from Juvenal’s Satires, vi. 291–2, cited in Latin, although Machiavelli adds ‘gluttony’ to the original. For the complete English text, see The Satires of Juvenal, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 74.





another work of mine: Machiavelli treats this question not only in The Prince (XII, XIII), but also in The Art of War: a work published in 1521 and one of only a few of his writings that appeared in print during his lifetime.





we deal with conspiracies: see Discourses on Livy, iii. 6.





as a garrison: Polybius (i. 7) describes how the people of Rhegium (today Reggio in Calabria) lost control to a Roman garrison between 279 and 271 BC, when Roman troops retook the city and sent many of the rebels to Rome for execution.





‘to be widely felt’: cited in Latin from Livy (ii. 20). See Rome and Italy, 246.





amply discussed in the appropriate place: see Discourses on Livy, iii. 16.





defeated by the Romans: according to Livy (viii. 11), after suffering one defeat by the Romans, the Latins were persuaded by Numisius to offer battle to the Romans again and were defeated by Manlius Torquatus at the battle of Trifanum in 340 BC.





after Louis XII died: the French monarch died on 31 December 1514.





an agreement with the church: this occurred following the battle of Marignano in September 1515.





‘equally intolerable’: Livy, viii. 13, cited in Latin. See Rome and Italy, 176. The fact that Machiavelli opens a chapter with a sentence from Livy once again points to the fact that the Discourses on Livy was initially conceived of as a simple commentary on Livy but developed into a more complex work of republican theory.





as we said above: Discourses on Livy, ii. 10.





later by Camillus: Lucius Furius Camillus was consul in 338 BC.





‘or generous treatment’: Livy, viii. 13, cited in Latin, shortening slightly the last sentence. See Rome and Italy, 177.





the entire Valdichiana rebelled in 1502: in 1503 Machiavelli wrote one of his earliest works in which he combines such historical examples from both the ancient and modern world with political analysis, a brief treatise entitled On the Method of Dealing with the Rebellious Peoples of the Valdichiana. It dealt with the rebellion in the Valdichiana and contrasted Florentine policy with that of the Romans in a similar situation.





‘the Privemates deserved’: Machiavelli constructs this conversation out of the Latin text of Livy (viii. 21). See Rome and Italy, 187. The events described here took place between 330 and 329 BC.





in the proper place: Discourses on Livy, iii. 40–1.





by our own wise men: here, as elsewhere when he discusses the usefulness of fortresses, Machiavelli treats this Florentine belief with contempt (see The Prince, XX).





‘arms remain’: cited in Latin from Juvenal, Satires, viii. 124. For a translation of the complete text, see The Satires of Juvenal, trans. Humphries, 105.





‘anger supplies weapons’: cited in Latin from Virgil, Aeneid, i. 150. See Fitzgerald (trans.), Aeneid, 8 for a complete translation of the passage.





Count Francesco Sforza: ruler of Milan, 1450–66.





to his heirs: upon his father’s death, Galeazzo Maria Sforza ruled Milan tyrannically until his death in 1476; his son, Giangaleazzo Sforza, lost control of Milan to his uncle, Ludovico Sforza (called Il Moro or the Moor) in 1480; Ludovico, in turn, lost the city to the French in 1499–1500, and when he was captured by the French at the battle of Novara he remained in captivity until his death; in 1512 the French left Milan; but the Sforza family once again lost control of the city after the battle of Marignano in 1515 as a result of their failure to hold the fortress, the Castello Sforzesco, which remains largely intact in the centre of the city today.





he chose to destroy them: Guidobaldo, duke of Urbino between 1482 and 1508, lost Urbino to Cesare Borgia in 1502 but regained it almost immediately, then lost it, regaining it again in 1503 after the death of Pope Alexander VI. Federico da Montefeltro was the most famous duke of Urbino, ruling between 1444 and 1482. The ‘unforeseen incident’ Machiavelli mentions is the rebellion against Cesare Borgia by his former allies that assisted the ruler of Urbino in regaining his territories, and which was suppressed by Borgia in the violent manner described in both The Prince (VII) and in A Description of the Method Used By Duke Valentino in Killing Vitel-lozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and Others, written in 1503. For a discussion of the treatment of this episode in these two works, see Bondanella, Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History.





useful to him: the administration of the papal governor, Francesco Alidosi, who ruled the city after 1508, was so disastrous that the city rebelled in 1511 and restored its former rulers from the Bentivoglio family.





in that state: Niccolò Vitelli from the town of Città di Castello was able to regain control of that city in 1482 with the assistance of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Pope Sixtus IV was Francesco della Rovere, pontiff between 1471 and 1484.





the example of Tarentum: Tarentum was captured by Hannibal in 212 BC, but the Roman citadel held out until Romans liberated the city in 209 (see Livy, xxvii. 15–16).





the example of Capua: occupied by Hannibal in 216 BC, it was reconquered by Rome after a lengthy siege in 211 (see Livy, xxvi. 14).





turn to Brescia: as Machiavelli has already noted in the Discourses on Livy, ii. 17, the town of Brescia was occupied by the Venetians and rebellious townspeople in 1512, but it was retaken by the French and suffered a disastrous sacking by de Foix’s troops.





‘only women living there’: in the Moralia by Plutarch there are several references to remarks by Spartan kings (Agesilaus, Agis, Theopompus) to the effect that walls are less useful than armed citizens, but these do not refer to Athens. For this and other related texts, see the section ‘Sayings of Spartans’ in Plutarch, Plutarch on Sparta, trans. Richard J. A. Talbert (New York: Penguin, 1988), 106–63.





the actions of Francesco Maria: according to Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy (xiii), Francesco Maria della Rovere marched upon Urbino in 1516, ignoring enemy towns controlled by his adversaries, and forced Urbino to surrender to him on 6 February 1517.





written previously: Discourses on Livy, ii. 22.





a different subject: Discourses on Livy, ii. 21.





the appropriate place: Discourses on Livy, iii. 6.





‘they rankle’: cited in Latin from Tacitus, Annals (xv). See Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome trans. Michael Grant (New York: Penguin, 1971), 378.





the ruin of the Florentine state: the downfall of the republic also ended Machiavelli’s political career.





Hasdrubal: not Hanniba’s brother but another general by the same name.





‘meet no check!’: Livy, v. 37, cited in Latin. See The Early History of Rome, 382.





‘to a cash payment’: Livy, v. 49, cited in Latin. See The Early History of Rome, 395.





a few years ago: 1509, a reference to the Venetian defeat at Agnadello (see note to p. 37).





that kingdom in 1513: allied with the emperor, the English invaded Picardy in this year.





‘as it was before’: in this instance, Machiavelli provides an Italian paraphrase of the original Latin in Livy (ii. 13). See Livy, The War with Hannibal, 182.





if they murdered him: see Livy (viii. 23) in Rome and Italy.





for fear of retribution: for the complete account, see Plutarch’s Lives.





‘a crown around the city’: Machiavelli cites a Latin expression here which is not literally taken from Livy’s history (x. 43). For the complete English text of the passage to which Machiavelli’s expression refers, see Rome and Italy, 349–51.





New Carthage in Spain: in 209 BC.





Aratus of Sicyon: 275–213 BC, leader of the Achaean League.





at present: Machiavelli’s assessment of the condition of the two most important republican governments in Italy (Venice and Florence) at the time the Discourses on Livy was composed is gloomy. Florence had been returned to the control of the Medici, and soon after Machiavelli’s death the city would fall under the hereditary rule of that family. Venice had lost much of its power through disastrous military defeats on the Italian mainland. Moreover, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European politics would be characterized by the rise of nation states dominated by monarchies, not republics, until the republican resurgence in the eighteenth century to which Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The Art of War made important intellectual contributions.





‘from time to time’: this aphorism (cited by Machiavelli in Latin) is the kind of maxim associated with popular versions of Galen’s teachings on medicine.





‘in opposition to the law of nations’: cited by Machiavelli in Latin, this phrase refers to the unwritten codes of conduct Romans and other Italian peoples followed in their dealings with each other and sometimes with other states. The most obvious example of such practices would be a prohibition against harming ambassadors and emissaries.





the deaths of the decemvirs: the decemvirs were actually exiled, not executed, although two committed suicide in prison (see Livy, iii. 58).





the laws and institutions: for a discussion of the lengthy tradition of exemplary republican heros, see Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World.





the two Catos: Marcus Porcius Cato the Censor (234–149 BC), and his great-grandson Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger (94–46 BC), immortalized by Plutarch’s biography and his appearance in Dante’s Commedia as a republican hero who preferred suicide to living under the tyranny of Julius Caesar.





still maintains this religion: Machiavelli’s view that ecclesiastical reforms by Franciscans and Dominicans actually increased corruption in the church represents one of his most shocking and cynical historical judgements.





father of Roman liberty: Machiavelli refers to the first Brutus, the man who established the first republic after the rape of Lucretia by a Tarquin aristocrat, not the second Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar (see note to p. 48).





any king ruling in Rome: in i. 56–60, the Roman historian recounts the single most important story in Roman historical mythology, that of the ‘first’ Brutus. Livy reports that Brutus ‘deliberately assumed a mask to hide his true character’ (Livy, The Early History of Rome, 86), and that when he and two friends went to Delphi and asked who would be the next king of Rome, the oracle replied that it would be the man who was the first to kiss his mother. Brutus interpreted the reference to a mother to be a reference to Mother Earth, and he immediately pretended to fall, kissing the earth in the process. Later, in a dramatic change of personality, Brutus would provide the catalyst to the indignant reaction to Lucretia’s rape and subsequent suicide, which resulted in the overthrow of the Tarquins and the establishment of a republic in Rome.





at length above: see Discourses on Livy, i. 16.





in this matter: for Soderini see note to p. 23 above. His extraordinary election to a lifetime position as gonfaloniere was intended to counterbalance the power of certain aristocratic groups in Florence who wished to destroy the pro-French and popularly based republic for which Machiavelli worked. Machiavelli owed his political career to his patron Soderini, but Machiavelli did not allow the personal gratitude he felt for his superior to influence the negative judgement he makes on Soderini’s career.





over with some reward: see Livy, i. 40 and 48.





Conspiracies: Machiavelli’s treatment of conspiracies is by far the longest chapter in the Discourses on Livy, and although classical political theorists (especially Aristotle) discuss them, no major work in the history of political theory before Machiavelli devotes so much space and intellectual energy to the analysis of conspiracies.





should tolerate them: see Tacitus, Histories, iv. 8. For the English text see Wellesley (trans.), The Histories, 208. In giving this kind of advice to the reader, Machiavelli anticipates the popular image of Tacitus that emerged after his death, which relegated Livy’s republicanism to the background and preferred Tacitus as the classical historian who had anticipated an age of absolute monarchs and who offered sage advice to the private citizen about how to avoid dangerous entanglements in such a political system. For a treatment of Tacitus in the late Renaissance and the seventeenth century, see Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), or Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World.





discussed at sufficient length above: Discourses on Livy, ii. 32.





with this matter elsewhere: in The Prince (XIX).





die a dry death: cited from Juvenal’s Satires, x. 112–13, in Latin. See The Satires of Juvenal, 125.





the opportunity to do so: ‘the present Turk’ is Selim I (1467–1520), the Ottoman ruler who succeeded his father Bajazet II (1446–1512), the target of an attempted assassination after he had failed to take Belgrade in 1492.





and Sejanus against Tiberius: it is significant that Machiavelli shifts from republican Rome to imperial Rome to find many of his examples of Roman conspiracies. With the support of the Praetorian guard, Perennius retained power until his execution by Commodus in AD 184; Plautianus, another prefect of the Praetorian guard under the emperor Septimus Severus, even had the promise of succeeding to the throne but was denounced and executed in AD 205; Sejanus practically controlled the empire in the absence of Tiberius but was finally denounced and executed in AD 31. Machiavelli relies on several sources for these examples: Herodian, On the Roman Empire for Perennius (i. 9) and Plautianus (iii. 12); and either Tacitus, Annals (v. 1–5) or Suetonius’ biography of Tiberius.





then took away his state: after both men had been driven into exile by Giangaleazzo Visconti, upon their return to Pisa Gambacorti made Jacopo his chancellor, but after a dispute over whether to ally the city with Florence (Gambacorti’s position) or Milan (Jacopo’s preference), Gambacorti was killed by his minister in 1392 and Jacopo ruled over Pisa until his death in 1398.





to acquire that as well: Francesco Coppola (1420–87), a rich merchant who became the count of Sarno, attained the highest offices in the kingdom of Naples before being involved in the plot of that kingdom’s barons against the king. The revolt supposedly ended with the signing of an agreement in 1485, when Ferdinand promised to pardon Coppola and other ringleaders. Only two years later, in May 1487, Ferdinand had Coppola and others executed and their property confiscated. Machiavelli makes a very brief reference to Coppola in The Florentine Histories (viii. 32).





it was to be carried out: the Annals of Tacitus (xv. 49–54) lists some twenty conspirators in this particular plot against Nero and also expresses the historian’s astonishment that it was not discovered sooner, given the number of people involved. In The Florentine Histories (viii. 3–7), Machiavelli lists the main conspirators involved in the 1478 plot that ended in the assassination of Giuliano de’ Medici, including not only the Pazzi family and their associates in Florence but also numerous anti-Medici exiles, who all enjoyed the tacit support of the pope. The Pazzi conspiracy is described in some detail in The Florentine Histories, viii. 1–10.





and Cebalinus to the king: Machiavelli’s source is the life of Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius Rufus (vi. 7). The event took place in 330 BC.





the ruin of all the conspirators: see Tacitus, Annals, XV. 54. This event took place in AD 65.





showed any sign of fear: see Livy, xxiv. 5. Machiavelli mistakes Theodoras for Theodotus, the name mentioned in Livy’s account. This occurred in 215 BC.





Nelematus’ plan: ‘Nelematus’ is a corrupted form of the correct name Hellanicus, mentioned both in Justin (xxvi. 1) and in Plutarch’s Of Virtuous ‘Wives, 253 A-B. The event occurred in 272 BC.





‘accuse you all’: unlike so many of the speeches and remarks cited by Machiavelli from classical history, this remark is apparently his own invention, not a cited source.





executed their plans: Machiavelli mistakes Ortanes for Otanes, the figure Herodotus (iii. 70–8) credits as the leader of the successful conspiracy against a Magus, or Zoroastrian priest, named Smerdis. The event took place in 521 BC.





succeeded in killing Nabis: Livy’s account of this event (xxxv. 35), which took place in 192 BC, gives the number of foot-soldiers as 1,000.





could not fail to succeed: Machiavelli does not mention the fact that, according to Tacitus (Annals, XV. 52), Piso refused to carry out the assassination of Nero in his gardens because it would have represented a breach of hospitality.





they killed Commodus: this occurred in AD 192, according to the account Machiavelli follows in Herodian, i. 16–17.





Martial carried out successfully: Machiavelli’s source for this event, which took place in AD 217, is Herodian (iv. 12–13).





the cardinal of San Giorgio: Raffaele Riario (1451/60–1521) was part of the Pazzi Conspiracy, which included not only Jacopo and Francesco Pazzi but also the archbishop of Pisa (Salviati). The conspirators enjoyed the tacit approval of Pope Sixtus IV. In Machiavelli’s works he generally refers to cardinals by the church to which their rank is attached, not by their family names.





while carrying out their plan: the men assigned to murder the Medici brothers in the church lost their nerve at the last minute, bungled the job (killing only Giuliano), and left Lorenzo alive to rally his followers and eventually to take revenge upon everyone connected with the conspiracy.





to kill him: see the biography of Marius in Plutarch’s Lives for the complete story.





Sitalces, king of Thrace: it seems that Machiavelli has taken an episode from Herodotus’ account of Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth (v. 92) and added it to Herodotus’ account of Sitalces (ii. 95–101). No failed conspiracy can be found concerning Sitalces in Herodotus or in any other historical source.





the duke’s cantor: Ferdinando and Giulio d’Este in 1506 plotted against Duke Alfonso I, who ruled from 1505 until 1534. The duke’s cantor, their accomplice, was Giovanni or Jean d’Artigna-nova, a Gascon. The plot failed and the two illegitimate brothers were imprisoned for life. See Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy, vii. 4, for details.





‘the great task that faced him’: Livy, XXXV. 35, cited in Latin. See Rome and the Mediterranean, 221.





could ever make me believe it: Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 593) notes that the Latin translation of Herodian (iii. 12) by Angelo Poliziano, which Machiavelli probably read, specified that the two men were to be struck down in two different rooms of the same palace, not really in two different geographical locations.





and avenged him: Machiavelli’s source is Justin, ii. 9, but it was Hipparchus, not Diocles, who was killed.





avenged him: see Justin, xvi. 5, for more details on this plot, which occurred in 353 BC.





a rare and almost unparalleled event: Machiavelli finds a description of this conspiracy in the biography of Pelopidas in Plutarch’s Lives, but makes some factual errors. The conspirators met in Charon’s home, but it was Phillidas, not Charon, who was their advisor. Plutarch does not mention ten tyrants but a lesser number of individuals. The conspiracy took place in 379 BC.





to flee from Siena: Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 594) notes that an earlier editor had corrected the MS to read ‘Luzio Bellanti’, confusing this conspiracy of 1508 against Pandolfo by Giulio with an earlier conspiracy led by Lucio Bellanti in 1495. Pandolfo Petrucci ruled Siena from 1498 until 1512.





they in time avenged the dead man: as Machiavelli notes in The Florentine Histories (vii. 34), Galeazzo Maria Sforza was assassinated in 1476 by three men (Giovanni, Carlo Visconti, and Girolamo Oligato), all of whom were ultimately executed for their crimes. The conspirators failed because they left Giangaleazzo, Ludovico il Moro, and Ascanio Sforza alive.





at various times and places: Machiavelli bases his remarks on the biographies of Caesar and Brutus he read in Plutarch’s Lives.





which clearly implicated them: Machiavelli’s sources are the biography of Cicero in Plutarch’s Lives and Sallust’s The Conspiracy of Catiline, xxxi.





of banquets and weddings: Machiavelli’s source is Justin, xxi. 4, which describes this event taking place around 350 BC.





tyrant of Athens: the biography of Solon in Plutarch’s Lives describes the stratagem Pisistratus employed to gain power.





the ruler of the city: Petrucci came back from exile in 1487 and received the command of the mercenary troops of the city government in 1496. See The Florentine Histories, viii. 35.





a tyranny in that city: Machiavelli’s source is Plutarch’s Lives, although the incident is also mentioned in Justin (iii. 6).





as we said elsewhere: Discourses on Livy, ii. 26. Machiavelli takes this example from Livy, vii. 38–41.





into operation: see Livy, vii. 38–41, for a fuller description of the actions of C. Marcius Rutulus in 342 BC.





to take the state away from him: some of most inspired pages in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories (ii. 3 3–7) are devoted to the rapid rise and sudden downfall of Walter de Brienne, duke of Athens. He was first appointed as executive officer in Florence in 1325 and then again in 1342. During his second stay in Florence the duke attempted to set up a tyranny in the city, and not one but three different conspiracies were organized against him. The arrest of Antonio Adimari caused riots in the streets, which forced the duke to withdraw from Florence.





from being a commissioner to being a prisoner: this occurred in 1502, not 1501, but Machiavelli’s account in other respects generally agrees with that in Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy (v. 8) or History of Florence (xxii).





of his state and his life: see the biography of Dion in Plutarch’s Lives.





the examples of Spurius Cassius: see Livy, ii. 41; the date is 485 BC.





and Manlius Capitolinus: see Livy, vi. 14–20. Manlius was executed in 384 BC. For a discussion of how these particular examples inspired not only Machiavelli but republican art in Renaissance Italy, see Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World.





‘not been born in a free state’: cited in Latin from Livy, vi. 20. See Rome and Italy, 64.





as was discussed above: see Discourses on Livy, iii. 1.





on many occasions: Machiavelli deals with the role of fortune and how men’s characters suit or fail to suit their times in a number of places, including the famous discussion in The Prince (XXV); a letter written in 1506 to Giambattista Soderini (see The Portable Machiavelli, 60–4); and a poem in terza rima, ‘Tercets on Fortune’ (see Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), ii. 745–9).





with the times: Livy discusses the successful delaying tactics of Quintus Fabius Maximus against Hannibal, as well as his bad counsel in advising Scipio not to cross over into Africa to conclude the war against Carthage, in several books (xxii, xxiii, xxviii).





‘in an unfriendly country’: Livy, vii. 12, cited in Latin. See Rome and Italy, 112. The dictator in question is Gaius Sulpicius in the year 358 BC. Machiavelli’s Latin text differs somewhat from the modern critical edition employed by the English translation cited here, and mentions Gneus (not Gaius) Sulpicius, an error.





the father of Perseus: this is Philip V of Macedonia (not the father of Alexander the Great), who was finally defeated by the Romans at the battle of Cynoscephalae in Thessaly in 197 BC (see Livy, xxxii. 11–12).





Gneus Sulpicius: as mentioned above, the correct name is ‘Gaius’.





‘in an unfriendly country: Machiavelli here repeats in Latin the quotation from Livy that opens the chapter with a slight variation, omitting a few words. See note to p. 283 above.





likewise routed by the Swiss: in 1476 Charles was defeated by the Swiss at both Granson and Morat. The battle of Novara took place in 1513, when French troops sent by King Louis XII to conquer Milan were routed by Swiss troops engaged by Duke Massimiliano Sforza.





after the peace: the alliance against Venice consisted of Pope Sixtus IV, Naples, Milan, and Florence, and was formed in 1482 to guarantee the territories owned by the duke of Ferrara; when Venice refused to give back some of this territory, the pope placed the Venetian republic under an interdict in 1483. These anti-Venetian forces were joined by the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua and the Bentivoglio rulers of Bologna. When it seemed that the Venetians were completely defeated and at the mercy of their enemies, Ludovico il Moro of Milan made a separate peace with the Venetians, and his partners were obliged to accept this fait accompli. The conflict was settled by the Treaty of Bagnolo in 1484. Not surprisingly, given the machinations of the parties involved, it was the duke of Ferrara who emerged with fewer territories than he had expected to protect through this alliance, while the duke of Milan was reported to have received a large payment from the Venetians for breaking ranks with his allies.





to come to terms themselves: commentators differ on the interpretation of the league formed ‘a few years ago’: Walker (The Discourses, ii. 173) interprets this remark to refer to the League of Venice, formed in 1495 by the Emperor Maximilian, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Pope Alexander VI, and Ludovico il Moro of Milan with Venice against France. When Ludovico signed a separate accord with France, Spain followed suit in 1497, resulting in the breakup of the league. On the other hand, Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 605) believes the alliance to which Machiavelli refers is the Holy League of 1511, sponsored by Pope Julius II, which broke up in 1513 when Spain signed a separate peace treaty with France. Given the similarity of the two historical situations, Machiavelli’s point would remain the same with either example in mind.





the life of this commander: Machiavelli refers to the biography of Marcus Crassus in Plutarch’s Lives. The promises of the Parthian general Surenas lulled the Romans into believing they could retreat, and in the resulting battle in 53 BC Crassus was killed, along with some 20,000 Roman soldiers, while another 10,000 were enslaved.





‘remains in arms’: cited in Latin from Livy, ix. 1, with a small variation from the text of today. See Rome and Italy, 216. The Samnite commander’s true name was Gaius, not Claudius Pontius. Livy discusses this incident in the Second Samnite War in 321 BC. As Giorgio Inglese notes (Discorsi, 606), Machiavelli makes reference to this same remark by Livy not only in The Florentine Histories (v. 8) but also in The Prince (XXVI), where he includes the word omitted here from the original Latin.





Gaius Manlius: see Livy, ii. 44–7, for the detailed description of these events, which took place in 480 BC. Machiavelli mentions Gaius Manlius here, a consul elected a few years later; the individual in question was actually called Gnaeus Manlius.





‘you have the advantage!’: cited in Latin from Livy, iv. 28. See The Early History of Rome, 300. This event occurred in 431 BC.





by many commanders: according to Livy’s description (v. 21), there was a terrible slaughter until Camillus gave this order, which put an end to the bloodshed, but it was certainly not a victory without bloodshed.





the strength of the Romans: Livy’s account of this incident occurring in 491 BC, also the source of the Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is found in ii. 40. Machiavelli uses the same term to describe Coriolanus’ mother which Virgil had used to describe Aeneas’ devotion to his family, his gods, and his country: pietas.





that province for the republic: the two Scipios in question are Gneus Cornelius Scipio Calvus and his brother Publius Cornelius Scipio, both of whom were killed in 211 BC fighting the Carthaginians (see Livy, xxv. 36–7).





‘without an army’: Caesar’s two statements are cited in Latin from Suetonius’ biography of Caesar (34). For an English version of Suetonius’ complete text, which Machiavelli has modified slightly, see Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (Baltimore: Penguin, 1957), 24. The first statement refers to the battle of Ilerda Caesar won in Spain in 49 BC; the second refers to the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC.





into a good commander: Walker’s commentary (The Discourses, ii. 175) notes that Machiavelli’s account here does not agree with the biography of Lucullus in Plutarch’s Lives and suggests that Machiavelli may possibly be using another source, Appian’s account of this war against Mithridates. Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 609), rejects this possibility, declaring instead that Machiavelli’s marginal notes suggest he simply failed to reconstruct the episode properly because of a lapse of memory.





an excellent army: Rome was so desperate for men after the disastrous defeat at the battle of Cannae by Hannibal, that in 215 BC the consuls armed 8,000 slaves willing to fight. Later, they were told that each man would earn his freedom if he brought back the head of an enemy after battle (see Livy, xxii. 57 and xxiv. 14–16). This stratagem almost backfired on the Romans, since the slaves were so intent on obtaining the heads of their victims that they were extremely inefficient in battle and had to be ordered to abandon the head-hunting.





said elsewhere: Discourses on Livy, i. 21.





he was victorious: see Livy, ii. 64, for this account of the actions of Titus Quinctius Capitolinus in the war with the Volscians in 469 BC.





an insignificant event: this incident, which took place in 1495, is also recounted in Guicciardini’s History of Italy (iii. 2), a work that Machiavelli could not have seen. Since he lived through the same period, however, it had probably already become a proverbial story by the time he began to write the Discourses on Livy. The Baglioni held Perugia until 1540.





the case of Cams Sulpicius: for details on the actions of Gaius (not Caius, as Machiavelli writes) Sulpicius Peticus, see Livy, vii. 14; this incident is also reported by Machiavelli in his Art of War (iv).





but even harmful: the incident is reported in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 16.





would break ranks: the exploits of Manlius Aemilius Mamercus, military tribune and dictator, against the Gauls are recounted in Livy, iv. 33.





‘make her your friend!’: cited in Latin from Livy, iv. 33. See The Early History of Rome, 306. The people of Fidenae had been defeated once before and were treated well by the Romans after their first defeat.





‘of the enemy’: cited in Latin from Livy, iv. 31. See The Early History of Rome, 303 (slightly altered to fit the English word order in this particular instance).





while he had a companion: Machiavelli personally accompanied these officials to Pisa as their secretary.





‘in the hands of a single man’: cited in Latin from Livy, iii. 70, editors’ translation. For another version which does not follow the original Latin text so closely, see The Early History of Rome, 262.





or even equal to him: Machiavelli modifies this account to suit his purpose. For a more accurate account of how the invasion of Sicily began, see Thucydides, vi. 8–24.





as we have said elsewhere: Discourses on Livy, i. 1.





the office to him: Lucius Paulus Aemilius, surnamed ‘Macedonicus’ because of his victory over the Macedonians at Pydna in 168 BC, is discussed in Plutarch’s Lives.





shamelessly insulted him: the Spanish campaign of Gaius Claudius Nero (211 BC) and his subsequent defeat of Hasdrubal (207) is discussed by Livy in xxvi. 17 and xxvii. 43. The battle of the Metaurus River resulted in the largest number of Carthaginian casualties in the entire war—Livy says 57,000, including Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother—thereby avenging the bloody Roman defeat at Cannae.





he killed himself: Machiavelli finds the description of the battle of Philippi (42 BC), where Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar defeated Brutus and Cassius, in the biography of Brutus in Plutarch’s Lives.





the French who were victorious: the battle of Marignano took place on 13–14 September 1515; Machiavelli mentions it in Discourses on Livy, ii. 18 and 22.





of the Aequi: Machiavelli slips here, meaning to say the Volscians (see Livy, iv. 37–41, for the correct details).





and won the war: Guicciardini’s version of this event, which took place in 1498, is in his History of Florence (xvii) and his History of Italy (iv. 3), although the detail about the old woman is not reported.





with their armies: see Livy, ii. 55–60, for events occurring in 472–471 BC involving Titus Quinctius Capitolinus and Claudius Appius (not to be confused with the notorious decemvir whose attempted rape of Virginia sparked a reform of the republican regime).





‘punishment is more valuable than indulgence’: Tacitus, Annals, iii. 55, cited in Latin. As both Walker (The Discourses, ii. 183) and Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 617–18) note, there is a discrepancy between the text cited by Machiavelli and the text as it has been transmitted to our day. The modern translation of Tacitus reads as follows: ‘For deference to the emperor and the wish to imitate him were more effective than legal penalties and threats’ (trans. Grant, Annals, 145–56). In effect, Machiavelli claims that Tacitus said exactly the opposite of what we believe today the historian wrote. Inglese explains this discrepancy in the following manner. The first six books of the Annals were originally published in March 1515 for Pope Leo X, who owned the only original manuscript (Mediceo Laur. 68). Inglese believes that the first Italian to consult the codex was Cardinal Francesco Soderini, who mentions receiving it in 1509. Machiavelli himself was in the Tyrol from January to June of 1508 and received a letter from a friend in Cologne informing Machiavelli that he was searching for such classical manuscripts. Inglese concludes that Machiavelli probably encountered friends who knew the text before it was printed and who probably heard some of Tacitus’ ideas expressed as maxims without being able to consult the critical edition until 1515. For the treatment of Tacitus in the Renaissance, see Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought.





another treatise on this subject: in The Prince (XVII).





of Falerii than arms: this famous incident took place in 394 BC, when Marcus Furius Camillus was besieging the town of Falerii (see Livy, v. 27).





the generosity of Fabricius: Machiavelli here follows the story contained in the biography of Pyrrhus in Plutarch’s Lives. Since the war continued for several years, it is probable that Pyrrhus did not abandon his ‘Pyrrhic’ victories in Italy because of this act of generosity but, rather, because he was significantly weakened by his costly military successes against the Romans.





the friendship of all of Spain: for these two events that took place in 210 BC, see Livy, xxvi. 46 and 50.





on another occasion: Discourses on Livy, i. 37.





anyone who makes himself loved: Machiavelli’s most important discussion of this topic is chapter XVII of The Prince.





both of them were glorified as well: the comparison of Scipio and Hannibal and the paradoxical success of each man through completely different methods were questions that intrigued Machiavelli early on, even before the composition of either The Prince or the Discourses on Livy. This is clear from an important letter written to Giovanbattista Soderini in 1506 which contains an earlier formulation of this comparison (see The Portable Machiavelli, 61–4, for an English translation). Giorgio Inglese’s commentary (Discorsi, 619–20) provides an illuminating discussion of the development in Machiavelli’s thought from this early letter to this section of his commentary on Livy.





‘Manlian commands’: cited in Latin from Livy, viii. 7. See Rome and Italy, 167.





‘certain of victory’: cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 10. See Rome and Italy, 108.





A prudent man: possibly a reference to Aristotle’s Politics, III. XV. 1286b.





‘greater popularity than this’: cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 33. See Rome and Italy, 141.





with Publicola: as Giorgio Inglese notes (Discorsi, 624), the family of Valerius Corvus (called Corvinus by Machiavelli) was traditionally associated with the name Publicola or ‘friend of the people’. Thus, this reference is probably not to P. Valerius Publicola who, with Brutus, served as one of Rome’s two first consuls in 509 BC (Livy, ii. 2).





bring him love: Xenophon’s works were published in Latin in 1490. Machiavelli certainly read his biography of Cyrus (the Cyropaedia) as well as the Hiero, a work on tyranny.





a gentleman appeared: many commentators identify this figure with Vettore Pisani (1324–80), who was first defeated by the Genoese in 1379, incarcerated by the Venetians, and then released when the Genoese fleet threatened to attack the city of Venice itself. His subsequent victory over the enemy fleet saved the city. Both Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 624) and Walker (The Discourses, ii. 188) note, however, that Machiavelli’s description is extremely confused and far removed from the historical facts about Pisani as they are accepted by contemporary historians of the Venetian republic.





‘but admired his exceptional ability’: cited by Machiavelli incompletely in the original Latin from Livy, v. 26 (editors’ translation). The complete text (see The Early History of Rome, 371) is somewhat longer: ‘this the troops violently resented, but discipline was good and they could not but admire the strict honesty of their commander however much they might disapprove of it.’





Lucius Quinctius: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, military tribune and dictator, celebrated in republican mythology for relinquishing military power and returning to his simple farm (see Discourses on Livy, iii. 25).





Publilius Philo: Q. Publilius Philo, consul in 339 BC and the first plebeian praetor in 337; Livy (viii. 26) describes how his military command at the siege of Palaeopolis (Naples) in 326 BC was extended, remarking: ‘He was the first to enjoy these two distinctions: an extension of his command, which was unprecedented; and a triumph after his term of office had ended’ (Livy, Rome and Italy, 195).





explained elsewhere: Discourses on Livy, i. 3 7.





‘inseparable from wealth’: cited in Latin from Livy, iii. 26. See The Early History of Rome, 213. Cincinnatus became dictator in 458 BC.





‘know how to be consul’: contrary to his usual practice of citing Livy in the original Latin, in this instance Machiavelli uses Italian translations in his text to convey the speeches of Cincinnatus to the besieged army and to Minucius (see Livy, iv. 29).





ruined by his workers: Marcus Atilius Regulus is more famous for the fact that, after being captured by the Carthaginians in the First Punic War, he was sent to Rome to arrange peace terms. Once at home, he urged the Romans to fight on, then returned (as he had sworn to do) to Carthage to face a terrible punishment and death. Valerius Maximus (iv. 4) mentions his request to return home to his farm in 256 BC, before his capture by the Carthaginians in the following year.





preferred the nobleman: Livy (iv. 9) refers only to the woman’s beauty, not her wealth.





fifteen years ago: the disturbances in Pistoia took place between 1501 and 1502. Machiavelli, in Pistoia as a commissioner from the Florentine government, wrote a brief report on these events in 1502 entitled De rebus pistoriensibus. Some commentators see this passage as proof that the Discourses on Livy, at least in part, were composed during the year 1516.





at the beginning: in the introduction to Book I of the Discourses on Livy.





at length above: see Discourses on Livy, ii. 24.





you possess divided: a typical example of Machiavelli’s stylistic shift between an impersonal reflexive verb and a direct address to the reader, employing the familiar tu form.





‘they divided themselves’: see the Decades (ii. 9) of Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), which Machiavelli cites in Italian rather than the original Latin. Biondo’s history was first printed in 1559, years after the publication of the first edition of the Discourses on Livy, but MS copies circulated widely long before that date.





a certain Monsieur de Lant: Monsieur de Langres.





the Marzocco faction: the symbol of the city of Florence, a rampant lion, was called the Marzocco.





had him put to death: around 439 BC (see Livy, iv. 13–14).





‘which always resembles its leader’: see Livy, v. 28 (editors’ translation). A less literal translation of this line is found in The Early History of Rome, 373.





fixed on their lord: cited from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Rappresentazione di SS Giovanni e Paolo (ii. 100). Giorgio Inglese (Discorsi, 631) notes that only Dante and Lorenzo de’ Medici receive the honour of being cited in the vernacular in the Discourses on Livy. Only a few sentences before this citation, Machiavelli cites Flavio Biondo in Italian, but he is translating material from a history originally composed in Latin.





‘what they had done for his’: cited in Latin from Livy, vi. 6. See Rome and Italy, 44.





‘nor did they believe, etc.’: see note to p. 32 5.





by nothing more than envy: Machiavelli greatly simplifies the account in Exodus 32, which describes how Moses and the sons of Levi slew numerous Israelites who failed to worship the one true god. Thus, Machiavelli overlooks the religious reasons for this event, attributing more ‘Machiavellian’ motives to Moses than can be found in the text itself.





‘lost anything through exile’: cited in Latin from Livy, vi. 7. See Rome and Italy, 46.





as was mentioned above: see Discourses on Livy, ii. 30.





‘do they become insolent’: unlike most of the Latin passages cited by Machiavelli in the Discourses on Livy from Livy’s history, this text is not a direct quotation, although Livy makes a similar remark in discussing Antiochus (xxxvii. 45): ‘But our feelings are subject to our own minds; and we have kept them unchanged and still keep them unchanged in every kind of fortune; success has never exalted them nor has adversity depressed them’ (Rome and the Mediterranean, 323). Machiavelli must have had this passage in mind when he employed a much shortened and more effective sentence to replace Livy’s more complicated explanation.





at Vailà: at Vailate or Agnadello (14 May 1509). This battle and its disastrous effects on the Venetians are also described in Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy (viii).





in matters of war: Machiavelli distrusts Venetian military policy, which usually employed mercenary soldiers on terra firma, whereas their splendid fleets were commanded by citizen-sailors and included many Venetians in their crews.





it has been said elsewhere: a possible reference to The Prince (XII), but the Discourses on Livy (ii. 4 and 21) also contains a similar argument.





‘with his training and habit’: cited in Latin from Livy, vi. 7. See Rome and Italy, 47.





sent them Hasdrubal: the account of this event Machiavelli finds in Polybius (i. 65–88) says the ambassador was Gesco, not Hasdrubal. Machiavelli also refers to this event in The Prince (XII) and The Art of War (I). The Hasdrubal in question is not the brother of the Carthaginian general Hannibal.





punished Claudius Pulcher: see Discourses on Livy, i. 14.





‘to be so great’: cited in Latin from Livy, vi. 41. See Rome and Italy, 94.





‘at the gallop’: cited in Latin from Livy, vi. 29. The dictator is Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus, and his master of horse is Aulus Sempronius Atratinus. See Rome and Italy, 75.





‘no leader to direct it’: the Latin phrase Machiavelli cites from Livy, vi. 30 is somewhat shorter than the quotation in the English edition from which we cite (see Rome and Italy, 77).





on another occasion: see Discourses on Livy, i. 11.





rather violent and extraordinary: an understatement—according to Livy (vii. 5), the tribune was threatened with instant death by the son if he did not swear an oath to forgo any action against the father.





that won him the name Torquatus: according to Livy (vii. 12), Titus Manlius killed an enormous Gaul who challenged the Romans to single combat and despoiled him of his torque or collar.





on the Ticinus River: Livy (xxi. 46) describes this act of filial loyalty during the first major battle against Hannibal.





decided among themselves to do: see Livy, xxii. 53.





to her husband in Spain: this noble act, known in the classical tradition as ‘the continence of Scipio’, inspired numerous paintings, frescos, and works of literature (Livy, xxvi. 50). For a consideration of this tradition in Western culture, see Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World.





a man more meritorious than he was: see Livy, xxiv. 8. Machiavelli does not mention that Quintus Fabius Maximus was the man who replaced Otacilius as consul.





by their results: the original Italian text (‘giudicando gli uomini le cose dal fine’) recalls the even more famous and often mistranslated line in The Prince (XVIII) concerning ends and means: ‘si guarda al fine’ or ‘one must consider the final result’.





to attack the Shah: Selim I, Ottoman ruler from 1515 to 1520, who captured Syria in 1515 and Egypt in 1516.





‘when I have no other remedy!’: Machiavelli found the biography of Paulus Aemilius in Plutarch’s Lives, but unlike his many quotations from Livy, which he customarily takes from the original Latin text, Machiavelli has invented this remark.





the French: the reader should remember that Machiavelli employs the word Franciosi for both ancient Gauls and modern Frenchmen. In most cases an English translation is able to distinguish his usage because of the context. In this particular instance Machiavelli links the ancient Gauls to the sixteenth-century inhabitants of France.





both fury and order: this classical term ‘fury’ refers to the specific quality of being belligerent or to ferociousness in war.





they failed as soon as that cooled: it is a commonplace of Machiavelli scholarship that The Prince concentrates upon a personalized and exceptional ability, skill, or ingenuity (virtù) in a single individual, whereas his Discourses on Livy emphasizes an institutionalized ability in ordini (organization, institutions, sometimes military discipline). Few passages in the Discourses on Livy show how closely these two terms may be related in Machiavelli’s thought as does this one discussing the French and their military virtues and vices.





‘and dedicated service’: these words, in Livy, viii. 34, are not the actual words spoken by Papinius Cursor but represent Livy’s summation of his oration, which Machiavelli cites in the original Latin. See Rome and Italy, 206–7.





as we previously discussed: see Discourses on Livy, i. 2.





‘on to Campania’: cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 11. See Rome and Italy, 108.





the guarding of passes: see Discourses on Livy, i. 23.





‘or strange enemy’: cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 32. See Rome and Italy, 140.





and like the Gauls: in the case of Manlius Torquatus (see Discourses on Livy, iii. 22).





‘on to Campania’: in this citation, Machiavelli has modified this previously cited passage from Livy’s Latin (see note to p. 342 above).





‘but by this right hand of mine’: cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 32. See Rome and Italy, 140.





spoken elsewhere: see Discourses on Livy, ii. 13.





‘so blind as to neglect it’: this and the two following quotations are cited in Latin from Livy, vii. 34. See Rome and Italy, 143–4.





on the lake of Perugia: at the battle of Lake Trasimeno in 217 BC (see Livy, xxii. 4).





the horns of his cattle: Hannibal escaped entrapment by Fabius Maximus in central Italy in 217 BC with just such a stratagem (see Livy, xxii. 17).





‘nor removes enemies’: cited in Latin from Livy, ix. 3. See Rome and Italy, 219.





in another place: see Discourses on Livy, ii. 23.





in our treatise ‘De Principe’: see The Prince, ch. XVIII.





‘than war with liberty’: cited in Latin from Livy, X. 16. See Rome and Italy, 310.





Decius and Fabius: this occurred in 295 BC (Livy, X. 27–9).





should follow this example: Livy discusses Gaius Marcius Rutulus, Papirius Cursor, and Q. Fabius Maximus Rullianus, consuls in 310 BC, in ix. 38.





in 1508: the Florentines calculated dates from the Annunciation or the Incarnation of Christ (25 March). Thus, the event in question actually occurred in 1509.





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1 Cited by Theodor E. Mommsen in ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages’, in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene F. Rice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 122. The citation comes from Petrarch’s Latin work Apologia contra cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias.





2 See The Portable Machiavelli, ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1979), 69.





3 The fundamental text linking the civic humanism of the Quattrocento to Machiavelli’s works and subsequent republican theory in England and America is J. G. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). A recent book dedicated to Italy’s impact upon the formation of American political and cultural traditions, La virtù e la libertà: Ideali e civiltà nella formazione degli Stati Unitly, ed. Marcello Pacini (Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1995), contains a number of important essays that discuss the Pocock thesis and affirm Machiavelli’s relevance to contemporary republican theory.





4 Cited from Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modem World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 42.





5 Cited from D. J. Gordon, ‘Giannotti, Michelangelo and the Cult of Brutus’, in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 235 (Gordon’s translation).





6 Cited from Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin, 1979), 34.





7 For a more detailed discussion of the relationship of The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, see the Introduction to the World’s Classics edition of Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).





8 The Prince, 30.