machiavelli the prince

Question 1

style

Answer 1

• Has not “prettified the book or padded it out with pompous or pretentious words.”
• No “irrelevant flourishes”

Question 2

aimsof the prince

Answer 2

• “controversial” “code of conduct”
• “republics and kingdoms which bear no resemblance to experience and never existed in reality.”
• “imagined republics’ < “effectual truth”

Question 3

predestination in the prince

Answer 3

• “luck” gives people the “initial opportunity”; “without this opportunity their talent would have gone begging- need to act w virtu
• • Medici house “fine qualities and fortune, favoured by God and the Church”

Question 4

look to religion for suport- prince

Answer 4

• “country is praying to God to send someone to save her”

Question 5

fotrune the prince

Answer 5

hardly worth making an effort” – “leaned a bit that way myself”
* “luck decides the half of what we do”

Question 6

statecraft- type sofstate prince

Answer 6

• Dialectical: the commons “are eager not to be ordered around or oppressed.” While the Nobles are “eager to oppress the common people and order them around”

Question 7

brutality and nec

Answer 7

• “pamper or destroy”
• “if you harm them a little they’ll hit back”
• “destroy” a free republic when conquering it
• “much safer to be feared than loved” – Hannibal vs Scipio
  borgia

Question 8

borgia

Answer 8

beheading of Remirro de Orco “propose him as a model” for rulership; his cruelty was in fact “much more compassionate” than the actions of the Florentines “whose reluctance to be thought cruel led to disaster at Pistoia.”

Question 9

limits to barabarism

Answer 9

above all else, must guard against being despised and hated’
leads to inevitable downsfal as did with
- you’ll always have to be wielding the knife and you’ll never be able to count on your subjects.”
- antoninus and pertinax and commodus

Question 10

antoninus

Answer 10

committed very many deeds of unexampled barbarity’, so that ‘he became greatly hated by everyone’ and ‘was killed by a centurion in the midst of his own troops’ (67–8).

Question 11

partinax and comodus delcine

Answer 11

hated as well as despised, as a result of which they were both assassinated (66, 68).

Question 12

florentine histories - why written

Answer 12

• Previous histories “wholly” inadequate, especially in the neglect of the importance of “tumults”.
• Panegyric to the Medici

Question 13

florentine histories obejctivity

Answer 13

• “never sought to cloak a dishonourable deed with a spurious defence”
• “no one who fairly judges my works will reproach of me as a flatterer.”

Question 14

flroentine histories subverive to his patronage

Answer 14

• perverse behaviour” of the previous government rather than their own attributes - reason for the Medici’s rise to power.
• • Focus on Cosimo’s rise

Question 15

cosimo rise

Answer 15

emphasises the importance of his wealth; also focuses on the “private” and “partisan” methods which he used – contrasting against the more honourable “public” methods of Neri Capponi.

Question 16

fortune fh

Answer 16

• likens fortuen to a wheel undergoing revolutions
• tempting fortune
• ‘worldy things are not allowed by nature to stand still

Question 17

fh- human nature

Answer 17

• “men are always more given to covet what they cannot have”
• “the more authority men get, the worst use they make of it”

Question 18

fh on corruption of the state

Answer 18

‘young men of Florence alienated from the values of the past, spent excessive amounts of money on clothes, banquets and lascivious pleasures’
medici excessive use f wealth holds hem accountable for this

Question 19

why no liberty called for before

Answer 19

‘for the ears of the people had been stopped by the prosperity and bounty of the Medici nd liberty was no longe known in florence’