Niccolo Machiavelli - Discourses on Livy

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Translation and Editorial Matter Julia Conaway Bondanella
and Peter Bondanella 1997

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1997
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2003

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

NICCOL MACHIAVELLI

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA
and
PETER BONDANELLA

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

DISCOURSES ON LIVY

NICCOL MACHIAVELLI was born in Florence in 1469. Very little is known of his life until his entrance into the Florentine chancery in 1498, where he served his mentor, the Florentine standard-bearer Piero Soderini, until the return of the Medici in 1512 overthrew Soderinis republic and brought Machiavelli both the loss of his position and even brief imprisonment for his republican sympathies. Retiring to his farm outside Florence, Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 (first posthumously published in 1532) and began the Discourses on Livy (first published posthumously in 1531). In addition to these major political works treating respectively the nature of the ruler and republican government (the latter always Machiavellis preference in spite of his evil reputation as a counsellor of tyrants), the Florentine writer also wrote lyric poetry, a novella, numerous brief essays and diplomatic narratives, a large and important body of private and public correspondence, The Art of War, The History of Florence, and the masterpiece of Italian Renaissance comedy, The Mandrake Root. Machiavelli died in 1527.

JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA is Professor of Italian at Indiana University. She is the author of Petrarchs Visions and Their Renaissance Analogues and Rousseaus Political Works and she is editor with Peter Bondanella of the Cassell Dictionary of Italian Literature. For Oxford Worlds Classics she has translated and edited Giorgio Vasaris Lives of the Most Famous Artists, and Benvenuto Cellinis My Life with Peter Bondanella. She is a Past President of the National Collegiate Honors Council and a former Assistant Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

PETER BONDANELLA is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University. He is the author of works on Machiavelli, Umberto Eco and Italian cinema (including individual works on Fellini and Rossellini). For Oxford Worlds Classics he has translated and edited Machiavellis The Prince.

For Livia Emilia Della Rovere in memoriam

Niccol di Bernardo Machiavelli was born on 3 May 1469 into a middle-class Florentine family from the Oltrarno section of the city. Although his ancestors had filled a number of posts in the citys government, the family was certainly not a major patrician clan equal in wealth or prestige to the more important families of the times. Not a great deal is known about Machiavellis early life. It is evident that his father must have instilled in him a love for Latin language and ancient history. He owned a copy of the Historarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades (145253, The Decades) by Flavio Biondo (13921463), an important Latin historical work in thirty-two books that narrated the history of Italy from the invasion of the Goths and the destruction of Rome in AD 410 down to Biondos own times. Biondo was one of the Florentine humanists who imitated the historical works of the Roman writer Titus Livius or Livy (59 BCAD 17) and who were responsible for making Livy the major historical model during the entire European Renaissance. Machiavellis father considered one of his prize possessions an edition of Livys history of republican Rome, which he obtained from the printer in return for the laborious task of compiling an index of Livys place-names. When Machiavelli entered the Florentine chancery in 1498, shortly after the execution of Girolamo Savonarola in the Piazza della Signoria, he entered an atmosphere imbued with the humanist spirit where Petrarch and Petrarchs favourite literary models (Cicero and Livy) provided models for the writing of eloquent governmental correspondence as well as historiography in Latin.

When Machiavelli was exiled from active political life in 1513 and retired to his country home in SantAndrea in Percussina outside Florence, he began work on his commentary upon Livys history of Rome. Around the same time (scholars are still debating exactly when and how), he also wrote one of the most famous of all political treatises, The Prince, first published posthumously in 1532, a year after the posthumous publication of his