Lehal Library

else. Machiavelli, remember, is facing objections from people who claim that the question of whether a ruler’s people do or do not hate him is not the crucial criterion when it comes to considering whether that leader will sur- vive. Those objections, what’s more, are based on the lives of certain Roman emperors. What Machiavelli is going to show in the following paragraphs is that the nature of power and political institutions in the Roman empire was profoundly different from that in a modern (early ­sixteenth-­century) state, the key difference being the exist- ence, in Roman times, of a strong standing army that, for safety’s sake, a leader had to satisfy before satisfying the people and that could often only be kept happy by allowing it to treat the people very harshly, stealing and raping at will. What this little clause appears to be doing, then, is preparing us for Machiavelli’s approach to answering the objection that has been raised: it is a question, he is going to tell us, of understanding a different historical context. The word ‘parte’ could be short for ‘a parte’ (apart, sep- arately) or ‘in parte’ (in part), as both the Italian translations take it. Now perhaps we can read the sentence as a whole thus: To meet these objections, I shall consider the qualities of some of these emperors, showing how the causes of their downfall are not at all out of line with my reasoning above, and bringing into the argument some of the context that historians of the period consider important.