The Discourses

In 1516, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli pens his Discourses on Livy while in exile from his native city of Florence. The Discourses are Machiavelli’s commentaries on the republic of ancient Rome—how it is founded, maintained, and protected—and how Roman wisdom in the art of statecraft can be used by all republics.

The Roman Republic is an early democracy that lasts from 509 BCE to 49 BCE. Roman scholar Titus Livius—“Livy”—first recorded its history in his monumental work Ab Urbe Condita (“From the Founding of the City,” or more popularly, “The History of Rome”), completed in 9 BCE. During the Middle Ages, most of the dozens of books that make up Livy’s great project are lost, but scholars in the 1300s launch a search to recover them. Roughly the first third of Ab Urbe Condita survives, its record of Roman history largely complete to 167 BCE. The remainder has never been found.

Machiavelli studies the surviving parts of Livy’s work and writes a three-book commentary on its first 10 volumes; he titles it Discourses on the First Ten Decades of Titus Livy, known today as the Discourses on Livy or simply the Discourses.