IN terms of the actual conduct that Machiavelli’s prince should display, he believes that any prospective ruler should try to emulate the great men of the past:

He should act like those who are skilled at shooting with a bow and arrow who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark. This is not done in order to reach a great height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.

Machiavelli does not rule out the fact that luck can also play an important part in whether or not a prince manages to retain control over a new principality. Three famous leaders who did not rely purely upon good fortune, he tells us, are historical and semi-mythical figures such as Moses, Cyrus the Great (600-530 BCE), Romulus and Theseus. He readily admits that Moses is said to have been a mere instrument of the Divine, but considers him worthy on account of having been chosen in the first place. This does not prevent Machiavelli from making the claim that Moses himself apparently took advantage of the fact that the Israelites were always more likely to follow him out of Egypt on account of being in slavery. For Cyrus, it was his ability to exploit Persian dissatisfaction with the rule of the Medes, or Ancient Iranians; for Romulus, his abandonment as a child which later provided him with the necessary impetus to become leader of his country; and, for Theseus, the dispersal of the Athenians and his ability to mould them into a single unit.

Returning now to the importance for a prince to maintain his control over a new principality, the author explains that he will always be unpopular with those who did well under the old system. He may also be challenged by those seeking to take advantage of the new stately order. Rather than use political diplomacy, he contends, or religious humility, the solution is coercion:

Hence all armed religious leaders have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed. Besides the reasons mentioned, the nature of the people is variable, and while it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion. Thus it is necessary to take such measures that, when they no longer believe, it may be possible to make them believe by force.

By employing such violence, perhaps in the way that his four historical personages did in their own lifetimes, the prince is able to obtain both respect and obedience from his subjects. Machiavelli completes this section with a fifth example: that of Hiero II of Syracuse (308-215 BCE), a man who rose from humble beginnings to become a captain, a prince and finally, once it had been said that all he needed to become a king was a kingdom, a great sovereign. As far as Machiavelli was concerned, Hiero’s uncanny ability to destroy the old and create anew – whilst retaining power – made him worthy of emulation.

Needless to say, Frederick the Great finds much to disagree with in this particular section of Il Principe and begins by undermining Machiavelli’s glorification of those who find themselves consumed by a self-destructive obsession with power:

A private individual who has the misfortune to have been born with this lust for power, is more miserable than mad. He is dulled to the present, and exists only in future or imaginary times; nothing in the world can satisfy him, and the drunken ambition which has mastered him always adulterates the softness of his pleasures with bitterness.

Such people can never be satisfied by the acquisition of wealth and territory, certainly not in the way that an ordinary man can be placated when his own needs are met, and they inevitably find themselves condemned to a perpetual hunger for yet more wealth and more territory.

Regarding Machiavelli’s choice of historical subjects, something that he describes as an attempt at ‘seduction’, Frederick adds that he could have chosen a number of individuals who went on to found either their own nations or their own particular religions; among them the likes of Odin and Muhammad (571-632). Yet something that Machiavelli never takes into account, he tells us, and which he also manages to conceal, are those who fall victim to the prince’s unbridled ambition:

This gives his work a bias towards imposing them on the world; one could not see easily that Machiavel plays, in this chapter, the role of apologist for the crime.

Again, Frederick accuses his counterpart of being highly selective and thus choosing to ignore those who used similar methods and yet failed in their quest for power. Like the present writer, too, he identifies the contradiction in Machiavelli’s claim that Moses himself was able to take advantage of Israelite subjection whilst apparently being guided from the heavens:

Either Moses was inspired by God, or he was not. If he were not (which we cannot assume is true), then Moses was a mere tool of God, used as the poets employ a deus ex machina when they cannot create a believable outcome. If you continue to evaluate Moses as a mere human, he could not have been very skilful: he led the Jewish people down a forty-year path, which they very easily could have completed in six weeks. He secured very little benefit from the enlightenment of the Egyptians: in this criterion, he was much lower than Romulus, Theseus, and the other heroes. If Moses was inspired by God, as is usually assumed, one can treat him only like the blind servant of the divine absolute power.

Frederick accepts the argument that Christianity often relied too much on prayer and devotion, rather than force of arms, but fundamentally differs with the simplistic assertion that Hiero II of Syracuse rose to power on account of his lowly origins. Indeed, as Frederick explains, Hiero eventually turned on the Syracusan soldiery and abused the trust and loyalty of his own friends. Frederick insists that by focussing on a particular historical outcome, Machiavelli suggests that the end justifies the means; however dark and indefensible those means happen to be. He concludes this section by saying that whilst

César Borgia is the role model of the Machiavellians: mine is Marcus Aurelius.

TO BE CONTINUED…