ABSTRACT
Machiavelli is in the country writing his Histories. Between himself and the life he longs for, there stand once more those woods and olive groves and the indifferent forgetfulness of men. By day he leads his usual life as he had described it to Vettori. If there are no thrushes to snare, there are beccafichi to catch with a net, there are the woods and the tavern. So he sinks again into that stagnant atmosphere, full of nostalgia for the fine discussions he had had in Modena with Guicciardini and the pleasing odour of public affairs he had been able to savour for a few days in the shadow of his friend the governor. Then, when evening comes, his solitude is again peopled with the shades of great men, and he converses with them. But these are now men of modern times, Florentines, and no longer those ancient Romans who had greater things to tell him and to whom he listened with greater reverence. Now that he has become the historian of the Republic by order of a Medici Cardinal, he no longer feels as free as he used to be when he followed his own inspiration; and besides, being a political writer and philosopher of history rather than a historian, he was more at home extracting principles of political science from history than writing it, even though writing history was for him simply to reduce it to principles of political science.
