Niccolò Machiavelli: Encyclopedia II - Niccolò Machiavelli - Works

Niccolò Machiavelli - Works

The best known work of Machiavelli is his political treatise Il Principe (The Prince). It was written in an attempt to return to politics as an advisor to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici. It has been argued that The Prince is not representative of Machiavelli's beliefs as his advocacy of tyranny seems to contradict his earlier works. However, Machiavelli seems to have been in earnest when he argued the advantages of cruelty and fraudulence. Apparently, he was hoping that a strong ruler would emerge from the Medici family, uniting Italy by expelling the foreign occupiers. Since its publication, Il Principe has become a legendary handbook on how to become and remain a ruler.

The Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on Livy), Machiavelli's second most famous work, focuses on the proper function of democratic states, as opposed to the autocratic regimes he discussed in The Prince. (Machiavelli references this in the second chapter of The Prince, which begins with the line: "Setting aside republics, about which I have spoken at length elsewhere, I shall concern myself only with princely states.") The Discorsi, as the work is most commonly known, espouses a much less harsh and cruel method of government than appears in the Prince. The Discorsi is really an analysis of a history written by the Roman Titus Livy. Machiavelli comments on passages from Livy's history and analogizes them to situations in contemporaneous Italian politics. (As an example, he compares the way in which Roman generals used religion to manipulate their soldiers to the brief ascendency in Florentine politics of Savonorola.

Both of his major works talk extensively about uniting the Italian peninsula under one government.

Niccolò Machiavelli - List of works

The following is a list of the principal works of Machiavelli:

• Discorso sopra le cose di Pisa, 1499
• Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, 1502
• Del modo tenuto dal duca Valentino nell' ammazzare Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, etc., 1502 (Description of the Methods Adopted by the Duke Valentino when Murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, the Signor Pagolo, and the Duke di Gravina Orsini)
• Discorso sopra la provisione del danaro, 1502
• Decennale primo (poem in terza rima), 1506
• Ritratti delle cose dell'Alemagna, 1508-1512
• Decennale secondo, 1509
• Ritratti delle cose di Francia, 1510
• Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, 3 vols., 1512-1517 (Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius)
• Il Principe, 1513 (The Prince)
• Andria, comedy translated from Terence, 1513 (?)
• Mandragola, prose comedy in five acts, with prologue in verse, 1513 (The Mandrake)
• Della lingua (dialogue), 1514
• Clizia, comedy in prose, 1515 (?)
• Belfagor arcidiavolo (novel), 1515
• Asino d'oro (poem in terza rima, a new version of the classic work), 1517 (The Golden Ass)
• Dell'arte della guerra, 1519-1520 (The Art of War)
• Discorso sopra il riformare lo stato di Firenze, 1520
• Sommario delle cose della citta di Lucca, 1520
• Vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca, 1520 (The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca)
• Istorie fiorentine, 8 books, 1521-1525 (Florentine Histories)
• Frammenti storici, 1525.

Other poems include Sonetti, Canzoni, Ottave, and Canti carnascialeschi.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Works", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki