Let's begin by presenting some newly discovered documents concerning Niccolò Machiavelli. The biographical detail may at first appear overwhelming, but the light these documents shed on the chronology of Machiavelli's composition of The Prince helps to answer some old questions concerning the character of Machiavelli's little treatise. The new documents date from the year 1515. They were drawn up at a time of financial difficulty and profound personal disappointment in the life of the former Florentine secretary and second chancellor. In 1512 Machiavelli had been fired from the chancery of the Florentine Republic. In 1513 he had been arrested on a probably false charge of conspiracy, tortured (although he gave no confession), and then unexpectedly freed in a general amnesty following the election of a Florentine, Giovanni de' Medici, as Pope Leo X. In 1515, at the time these documents were drawn up, Machiavelli was still out of favor. But he was also putting into prose the theoretical work that established the extraordinary reputation still associated with him today.

Alexander the Great and his legacy suffuse The Prince, a fact that has received little attention. Machiavelli uses Alexander to illustrate the form of rule in which one is lord and all others are slaves. In recounting the Roman Republic's conquest of Greece, Machiavelli treats Alexander's vanquished successors. Alexander's legacy enters Rome itself, igniting in Romans the desire to subject the world to sole preeminence. According to Machiavelli, Caesar imitated Alexander, and Caesar overturned the republic, initiating the rule of one in Rome. Caesar had his own Roman successors, the emperors who ruled under his name. Rome succeeded in imposing the rule of one on Europe. That form of rule exists in Machiavelli's times with the states of the Turk and the Sultan as well as with the papacy in a limited respect. Something of the old Rome and its Alexandrian aspirations persists in Christian Rome.

This essay questions the seemingly laudatory judgment of Cesare Borgia in The Prince, chapter 7, by highlighting its emphasis on Borgia's dependence on the arms of others, which Machiavelli equates with “fortune.” During their encounters in 1502–1503, Machiavelli became keenly aware of Borgia's dependence on his papal father, on France, and on mercenaries. The praise of the “foundations” Borgia allegedly laid to remedy this dependence (including a fantasized conquest of Tuscany) is not Machiavelli's own assessment but the voice of Borgia's self-dramatizing and self-deceiving exaggerations. Knowing the weakness behind Cesare's bravado, Machiavelli could not have considered him the model of the “new prince,” still less of the “redeemer” invoked in chapter 26. On the contrary, Borgia is the negative model of the new prince who depends on the arms of others, inevitably fails, and blames fortune misconstrued as malicious fate.

This article traces Machiavelli's indebtedness to Sallust in his discussion of Agathocles the Sicilian in chapter 9 of The Prince. In distinguishing between virtù and glory, Machiavelli was influenced by Sallust's discussion of Catiline and Caesar, and of true and false glory, in the Bellum Catilinae. Writing to Caesar at the height of his power, Sallust needed to negotiate a delicate political situation that was in some ways analogous to Machiavelli's own difficult position vis-à-vis the Medici. Just as, in addressing Caesar, Sallust points up the difference between Caesar as he was and as he might have been, so in the example of Agathocles Machiavelli presents the Medici with a choice between mere virtù and the glory achieved by the really excellent men. It was the prospect of this glory that Machiavelli held out to the Medici in the concluding chapter of The Prince.

This article examines the roles of belief and opinion in Machiavelli's Prince. Political success and failure are effected not only by force and arms but by religious belief in particular, and more generally by the beliefs and opinions of peoples. Princes can also be the beneficiaries or the victims of their own beliefs and opinions. Machiavelli occasionally explicitly states a view as his own belief or opinion such as his belief in cruelty well used or his opinions that a prince should found himself on the people and avoid their hatred. His beliefs and opinions both contrast with common beliefs and opinions and are modified in response to them.

Machiavelli's argument in chapter 25 of The Prince for resisting Fortune is no longer persuasive. The reason is that it is based on the outmoded Ptolemaic cosmology. With that cosmology long discarded, it is time to discard the political philosophy based on it. But discarding the political philosophy does not mean discarding the chapter. On the contrary, we should study the chapter with renewed diligence as part of the history of Machiavelli's political philosophy. The distinction between his political philosophy and the history of his political philosophy is critical here.

Machiavelli often seems to advocate a conception of religion as an instrument of political rule. But in the concluding chapter of The Prince Machiavelli adopts a messianic rhetoric in which politics becomes an instrument of divine providence. Since the political project at stake in The Prince, especially in this last chapter runs against both the interests and the ideology of the Catholic Church in Italy, some commentators have argued that Machiavelli appeals to providence merely in order to fool the Church and the Medici. This article argues that it is not necessary to appeal to such exoteric readings of the 26th chapter of The Prince if one envisages the possibility that Machiavelli may have drawn upon an alternative, non-Christian conception of divine providence coming from medieval Arabic and Jewish sources that is more compatible with his desire to return to Roman republican principles than is the Christian conception of divine providence.

Machiavelli's Prince circulated widely in manuscript form in Italy way before its publication in 1532. Its reception was mixed from the start: some readers found in it a frank, sometimes ironic, description for the benefit of the people of the evil means used by bad rulers; others read in it evil recommendations to tyrants to help them maintain their power. The history of the reception of the Prince in Italy discloses a book with many facets: the impious and amoral Machiavelli of the Jesuits; the republican champion of the people, who unveiled the evil practices of tyrants, of the Enlightenment and Romantic readers; the citizen and patriot who fought for the liberation of Italy of the “Risorgimento”; the nationalist author who realized the limits of popular sovereignty and the necessity of force during the Fascist era; and many more Machiavellis and Princes present in Italy in the past five hundred years.

Here is a study of what Leo Strauss in his marvelous book, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), tells us about Machiavelli's The Prince, and how he tells it. The “how” is quite remarkable: his book is unlike any other book that has ever been written on Machiavelli. For the first time Machiavelli's esotericism is not only alluded to or introduced but explained at length. In explaining, Strauss shows how he arrived at his discoveries in Machiavelli's texts, teaching his readers the proper mixture of innocence and savvy. With his book Strauss gives a wholly new picture of an author who set store by being “wholly new.” All scholarly studies on Machiavelli can now be divided into those written before Strauss and those written after him, and the latter between those that take account of him in some fashion and those that willfully, or blithely, ignore him.

It is very unusual for books under review to relate to each other as instructively as do these three books on punishment. They truly deserve to be read and reviewed together.