THE PRINCE

THE PRINCE by N. MACHIAVELLI

The Prince N. Machiavelli

Niccolo Machiavelli

The word 'Machiavellian' suggests fiendish cunning and shameless duplicity, and was being defined as such in English dictionaries as far back as 1569, just 42 years after Niccolo Machiavelli died. He was a fun-loving joker with the soul of a poet and a mistress in every town: an innovative thinker ahead of his time. The trouble with this supposedly revisionist thesis is that the more White tells us about Machiavelli, the more it seems the dictionaries got him right all along. Born in 1469, Machiavelli was a Florentine legislator and diplomat who wrote several works, including a highly popular stage play that was the Renaissance equivalent of a bedroom farce. The Prince was a reflection of his own experiences in live and the struggle he faced in the hardest times.

Introduction

Machiavelli's legacy has been incorrectly interpreted and associated with the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. Following this key of interpretation, Machiavelli appears to be the victim of a time when the fire of religious intolerance consumed all the works of thought and reclaimed certainties based on faith. One of the first interpreters of Machiavelli's works in this key of interpretation is Innocent Gentillet who associates Machiavelli's legacy to massacre on Saint Bartholomew's Day. Today, one cannot read Machiavelli without having in mind these nefarious interpretations.

Other interpreters considered Machiavelli to be in complete contradiction with the Greeks' classical way of thinking. Machiavelli claimed that actions are considered to be right or wrong according to their consequences and not according to the personal character or intentions of the person involved in that action. The aim of this paper is to argue that Machiavelli's ethics is not entirely opposed to classical Greek ethics; in fact, virtue and arête are two concepts with common origins (Mansfield 1996, 6).

Context in which he wrote

The context of the book can be seen in the perception of the author of the conquest of the region by Cesar. The Prince was one of the most barbaric psychopaths in diplomatic history. Cesare's first murder victim was his own brother, an act possibly motivated by sexual jealousy over their younger sister Lucrezia, at least one of whose husbands would later die at Cesare's hands. A gangster is far more terrible than anything in a Martin Scorsese film, Cesare got his kicks by disguising himself and prompting unsuspecting strangers to bad-mouth him. One victim was promptly arrested and had his hand and tongue cut off, with the tongue being nailed on the stump for abundant measure (Newell 1987, 612).

Cesare was the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, a man who, according to contemporaries, turned the Vatican into a brothel, enjoying "every night twenty-five or more women between Ave Maria and one o'clock". Cesare used his power base to intimidate and overwhelm a succession of small principalities. Machiavelli accompanied him on campaigns and saw his shock tactics. The people of one town woke to find that the leader installed by Cesare ...