[57] Cp. K. M. Sauer, Gesch. der italien. Litteratur, 1883, p. 109; Villari, Machiavelli, i, 138. [↑]
[58] Villari, Machiavelli, i, 133. [↑]
[59] Greswell, pp. 331–32. [↑]
[60] Discorsi sopra Tito Livio, i, 12. [↑]
[61] Istorie fiorentine, liv. i; Discorsi, i, 12. [↑]
[63] For another point of view see Owen, as cited, p. 167. [↑]
[64] In the Italian translation of Bacon’s essays, made for Bacon in 1618 by an English hand, Machiavelli is branded in one passage as an impio, and in another his name is dropped. See Routledge ed. of Bacon’s Works, pp. 749, 751. The admiring Paolo Giovio called him irrisor et atheos; and Cardinal Pole said the Prince was so full of every kind of irreligion that it might have been written by the hand of Satan (Nourrisson, Machiavel, 1875, p. 4). [↑]
[65] Burckhardt, pp. 499–500. Cp. Owen, pp. 165–68. It is thus impossible to be sure of the truth of the statement of Gregorovius (Lucrezia Borgia, Eng. tr. 1904, p. 25) that “There were no women skeptics or freethinkers; they would have been impossible in the society of that day.” Where dissimulation of unbelief was necessarily habitual, there may have been some women unbelievers as well as many men. [↑]
[66] Owen’s characterization of Machiavelli’s Asino d’oro as a “satire on the freethought of his age” (p. 177) will not stand investigation. See his own note, p. 178. [↑]