Lehal Library

generically to men of power, men who rule a state. The prince is the first, or principal, man. So the translator is tempted to use the word ‘king’. At least in the past a king stood at the apex of a hierarchical system, he was the man who mattered. But it is difficult, translating Machiavelli, to use the word ‘king’ to refer to the lord of Imola, or a pope, or a Roman emperor. In the end, as far as possible, I have resolved this problem by using the rather unattractive word ‘ruler’, or even the more gen- eric ‘leader’, though always making it clear that we’re talking about the political leader of a state. The book’s famous title, however, must be left as it is. Even harder to solve is the translation of ‘virtù’, together with a number of other words that cluster round it. It would be so easy to write the English cognate ‘virtue’, meaning the opposite of vice, but this is not what Machi- avelli was talking about. He was not interested in the polarity ‘good’/‘evil’, but in winning and losing, strength and weakness, success and failure. For Machiavelli ‘virtù’ was any quality of character that enabled you to take pol- itical power or to hold on to it; in short, a winning trait. It could be courage in battle, or strength of personality, or political cunning, or it might even be the kind of ruthless cruelty that lets your subjects know you mean business. But one can hardly write ‘cunning’ or ‘cruelty’ for ‘virtù’, even if one knows that in this context that is what the text means; because then you would lose the sense that although Machiavelli is not talking about the moral virtues