How The Prince drew on Plutarch's Lives
A documented line of influence: Niccolò Machiavelli demonstrably engaged Plutarch’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch · c. 110
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1513
RenaissanceRelevance
7/10
On The Prince’s page
- The Prince's arsenal of examples is largely Plutarch's: Machiavelli cited him by name throughout the Discourses and mined the Lives for the exempla that make his case
- Plutarch supplies the raw material for some of The Prince's most shocking moves — conquering fortune, the calculus of fear — and even the lion-and-fox figure, first recorded as Lysander's maxim
- Read Plutarch and you watch the same lives Machiavelli stripped of their moral varnish and read for power
On Plutarch's Lives’s page
- Machiavelli quarried the Lives for The Prince's hard examples — Plutarch is the source behind several of its most iconoclastic claims, from conquering fortune to being feared rather than loved
- Even the famous lion-and-fox image of cunning rule traces back here: Plutarch records it first as Lysander's maxim
- The Renaissance read its ancients through Plutarch — The Prince is what one ruthless reader did with them