I quite like this short essay/biography of Machiavelli. The author of The Prince. (free ebook) Or Barnes & Noble
Chutzpah, perhaps? Entitlement, even? Or maybe just an ironic contrast to Vettori, who has access to the real halls of power? Probably all of the above, but it is above all a performance. Machiavelli here uses an ancient rhetorical technique called prosopoeia. From the Greek prósopon (“face, person,” and poiéin “to make, to do”), it is a trope of personification. As the Roman orator Quintilian explains, prosopoeia is used “to introduce conversations between ourselves and others. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead.”8 This is exactly what Machiavelli is doing: he conjures the souls of the dead. After all, every time we read, we breathe into texts whose afterlife exists because of us. We revivify figures that are no longer here. But we are dependent on them in turn — they give us a storehouse of language and ideas, and we make them live again through our own words and voices. Reading as necromancy, then.
W. E. B. Du Bois may have been thinking about Machiavelli when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.9
