Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
1531
Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
1531
Translated by Ninian Hill Thomson
This is the Machiavelli they don't teach you in school. While The Prince made his name synonymous with cynical manipulation, the Discourses reveal something unexpected: a passionate theorist of republican freedom and civic virtue. Written during his exile from Florence, when Machiavelli was excluded from the political life he loved, this treatise emerges from his close reading of Livy's history of early Rome. But this isn't nostalgic antiquarianism. It's a systematic investigation into how republics are born, how they survive, and how they die. Machiavelli dissects the Roman Republic's first decade to extract principles that could inform any state's struggle for liberty. He examines the tensions between Senate and populace, the crucial role of tribunes in checking aristocratic power, and the paradox that internal conflict, properly channeled, can strengthen rather than destroy a republic. Here is Machiavelli at his most optimistic: believing that citizens can be educated, that institutions can balance self-interest with the common good, and that freedom is worth fighting for. The cynical advice of The Prince was written for princedoms; this work was written for citizens.
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“Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in ancient times.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“Let no man, therefore, lose heart from thinking that he cannot do what others have done before him; for, as I said in my Preface, men are born, and live, and die, always in accordance with the same rules.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“For a Monarchy readily becomes a Tyranny, an Aristocracy an Oligarchy, while a Democracy tends to degenerate into Anarchy. So that if the founder of a State should establish any one of these three forms of Government, he establishes it for a short time only, since no precaution he may take can prevent it from sliding into its contrary, by reason of the close resemblance which, in this case, the virtue bears to the vice.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“The salvation of a republic or a kingdom is not, therefore, merely to have a prince who governs prudently while he lives, but rather one who organizes the government in such a way that after his death it can be maintained.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times”
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“Another difficulty to be added to the one mentioned above is that a state that becomes free creates for itself enemies rather than friends.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“CHAPTER XXVI.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli
“Whether this has ever happened I know not, nor whether it ever can happen. For we see, as I have said a little way back, that a city which owing to its pervading corruption has once begun to decline, if it is to recover at all, must be saved not by the excellence of the people collectively, but of some one man then living among them, on whose death it at once relapses into its former plight; as happened with Thebes, in which the virtue of Epaminondas made it possible while he lived to preserve the form of a free Government, but which fell again on his death into its old disorders; the reason being that hardly any ruler lives so long as to have time to accustom to right methods a city which has long been accustomed to wrong.””
— Niccolò Machiavelli
