ABSTRACT
Discurso de las privanzas, Política de Dios, and Marco Bruto offer reflections of a general nature on political activity. They are not identical in terms of form, given that the first two adopt a scheme, so common in their time, of a treatise addressed to the monarch, whereas Marco Bruto is a political biography, enlarged with a historical commentary and some persuasion in the style of Seneca the rhetorician. 1 The three works address a topic which was cultivated abundantly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the fields of stoicism, scholasticism, natural law, Tacitean studies, and so-called political realism, that is to say: doctrines aimed at the moral analysis of those in power and the methods used to retain power.
