Parole Rubate (Jun 2016)
Tessere virgiliane
Abstract
Even if Virgil was not one of the key authors in his library, Machiavelli was undoubtedly very familiar with the Roman poet’s output, as the (admittedly limited) quotations examined in this article demonstrate. The most striking example is his textual borrowing from Aeneis, I, 563-564, with the image of Dido as a “new prince” appearing in the seventh chapter of Il Principe, and two quotations in the Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, I, 21 and I, 54. In addition to some secondary cases, this article focuses on the starting point that Francesco Vettori’s quotation of a well-known passage from the second ecloga offers to the well-known Machiavellian letter of 31 January 1515, as well as on a final Virgilian fragment in a letter of 1526.
