Discourses on Livy

Discourses on Livy (1551) is as essential to an understanding of Machiavelli as his famous treatise, The Prince. Equally controversial, it reveals his fundamental preference for a republican state. Comparing the practice of the ancient Romans with that of his contemporaries provided Machiavelli with a consistent point of view in all his works. Machiavelli's close analysis of Livy's history of Rome led him to advance his most original and outspoken view of politics -- the belief that a healthy body politic was characterized by social friction and conflict rather than by rigid stability. His discussion of conspiracies in Discourses on Livy is one of the most sophisticated treatments of archetypal political upheaval ever written. In an age of increasing political absolutism Machiavelli's republican theories became a dangerous ideology. This new translation is richly annotated, providing the contemporary reader with sufficient historical, linguistic, and political information to understand and interpret the revolutionary affirmations Machiavelli made, based on the historical evidence he found in Livy. Book jacket.

Julia Conaway Bondanella is Associate Professor of French & Italian and Associate Director of the Honors Division at Indiana University. She is Coeditor of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists in World's Classics. Peter Bondanella is Distinguished Porfessor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Film Studies, Italian and West European Studies at Indiana University. He edited and co-translated Machiavelli's The Prince (WC).