ABSTRACT
Machiavelli intended that his conversations with the ancients should also be conversations with his compatriots, part-time students of the Latin classics. Florence might yet be saved if his fellow Florentines unburdened themselves of Christian virtue and girded themselves with the armor of pagan virtus. The secretary's entire method of analysis and argumentation presupposed the interchangeability of ancient Roman and modern Florentine experience. Less what Machiavelli thought than how he thought it enabled him to glue disparate historical eras into a seeming oneness. Machiavelli thought the world through the categories, concepts, and genres of Latin literature, which sorted, classified, and ordered his experience so symmetrically that his thought, while not constituting a vast philosophical system in the manner of Aristotle or Hegel, nevertheless puts forth something closely resembling a world-view. Machiavelli's method of conversing with his contemporaries, of persuading, cajoling, and winning them over to his point of view, was to insinuate his message into their conversations with the ancients.
