Rome, republicanism and militarism. Titus Livy and Machiavelli

Abstract

Machiavelli dealt with the topic of war not only in his book On the Art of War, but also in all his other books and several short writings. One of the most important sources of his ideas was the political and military history of the Republic of Rome, which he learned about through various historians, but above all through the Ab Urbe condita, by Titus Livy. However, the precepts and conclusions that Machiavelli establishes about the art of war, presumably drawn from the Roman practice of this activity, do not always fit or coincide with the observations of Livy, which is partly due to the idealization of the soldier and the Roman army.