Listening to Machiavelli
A supine adventure
Fool that I am, I let more than half a century pass between my first reading of The Prince and a serious attempt to tackle the big daddy rabbit of the opere of Niccolò Machiavelli, the Discourses upon the First Decade of Titus Livius. Earlier this month, however, a visit by unwelcome guests of the microbial persuasion gave me an opportunity to fill this gap in my education. Thus, I instructed my souped-up old MacBook Pro to play, while I drifted in and out of sleep, recordings of people reading some of the 142 discursions for which the book was named.
At first, the viva voce versions of these bite-sized essays came from collection published by Librivox. The fruit of the efforts of many volunteers, these created a cornucopia of cadence, accent, and interpretation that, under normal circumstances, would have enhanced the experience. However, as I wished to employ the programs as, among other things, a kind of lullaby, I quickly switched to an audiobook in which a single reader - shout out to Brian LaFonte - read all 487 pages of Ninian Hill Thompson’s 1883 translation of Machiavelli’s Meisterwerk.
The structure of the book fit nicely with my curious manner of listening. That is, my moments of consciousness lasted long enough for me to engage the tail end of one little essay, the entirety of a second, and the start of a third. Thus, whatever else I learned, I discovered the formula for a typical discourse - a question, an anecdote drawn from the annals of republican Rome, and an observation on recent events in Italy.
Some discourses departed from this default. The one chapter I had engaged before embarking on my slugabed adventure, which dealt with the use of gunpowder artillery, contains fewer mentions of the Classical world than the Common Core Curriculum. A few of the building blocks, moreover, while rich in romanità, lack contemporary content. Nonetheless, the formula appears often enough to convince me that, whatever else he was doing, Machiavelli took pains to convince his readers of the timelessness of his observations.
Reflection on this experience yielded a second lesson. While The Prince takes up less space on the shelf than the Discourses, readers interested in the ideas of Machiavelli should probably begin with the latter. For one thing, each discourse presumes less in the way of prior knowledge, whether of Classical Rome or Renaissance Italy, than an equal weight of verbiage from the smaller book. (Indeed, many of personalities who make cameo appearances in The Prince play starring roles in the Discourses.) For another, the ‘one thing at a time’ format of the Discourses permits the author to unpack each observation at greater leisure.
Sources
Niccolò Machiavelli (Ninian Hill Thomson, translator) Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius (London: Keegan, Paul, Trench, and Company, 1883) (Internet Archive)
Pamela Nagami and others, reading of the Thomson translation of Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius (Internet Archive) (Librivox)
Bryan LaFonte, reading of the Thomson translation of Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius (YouTube)
Note
I used a two-step process to restore the painting that appears at the top of this piece. First, I converted the scan of the damaged original into a black-and-white image. Then, I asked ChatGPT to colorize the picture.
For Further Reading
