Review: Discourses on Livy, by Niccolo Machiavelli

Think Machiavelli and immediately the mind jumps to The Prince. And why not? It’s a damned good book, despite the outrage generated when he had the temerity to be honest about how political reality worked.

However, he also wrote a number of other books, including Discourses on Livy. It’s larger than The Prince’s slender proportions, similar in terms of including advice on governance but differing in the general preference for a republic over a principality.

The Prince was written [in a rush] for a specific individual, Lorenzo de Medici, at a specific time, when it seemed the Medici family might be able to form a solid Italian state and rescue it from what Machiavelli saw as perpetual infighting, leading to weakness and making Italy ripe for foreign invasion.

Discourses on Livy took longer to write, and was not aimed at a specific individual who might give Machiavelli a job and spare him from drudgery. It’s also, as the same suggests, more focused on commentaries about Livy’s (surviving) writing and comparing ancient Rome to modern Italy. There are some other historical and contemporary comparisons, but that’s the heart of it.

You do not not need to have read anything by Livy to get the references, which are explained both by Machiavelli himself and the very helpful notes (as an aside, I still hate endnotes and this edition, by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, uses endnotes).

Machiavelli’s commentaries are a mix of domestic governance and military advice, and whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, he does back everything up with his own reasoning and historical/contemporary examples.

The hero-worship of Rome does lead to some questionable conclusions. For example, he praises Hannibal’s skill unstintingly but nevertheless describes the Carthaginian general as treacherous and cruel. The first is a charge made by Romans who thought battle tactics amounted to cheating (specifically cited was his provoking Flaminius into chasing him to Lake Trasimene, which didn’t end terribly well for the Romans), and the second is a shade rich given Livy himself praised his ancestors for wiping out so many adult males from a rival. (Hannibal also never committed genocide, unlike Alexander or Julius Caesar).

However, for the most part Discourses on Livy is an interesting blend of history, politics, and human nature. Unlike many at the time, Machiavelli is ready and willing to face up to the fact that people are capable of acting horrendously in their own self-interest, and that those at the top of politics have their actions governed more by expedience than morality (more recently termed ‘reasons of state’).

The main flaw, endnotes aside, is the Animal Farm problem. Like 1984 to Animal Farm, Discourses suffers a bit by way of comparison with the slimmer and similar ‘other book’. I’d probably suggest buying The Prince, and, if you like it, then giving Discourses on Livy a look.

Thaddeus