2025 Readings 75

 Here's another book that I ended up reading because of the never-ending demands of the Epics book. I was looking for one particular passage in Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and, of course, ended up reading the entire book for the first time in around thirty years. As part of the buildup to explaining his famous proposal that it is better to be feared than loved, Machiavelli ended up quoting something that Virgil has Dido say in the Aeneid. So, essentially, I was looking for verification for something that constituted half a paragraph, and this led me to rereading an entire book (and this is why the Epics project has stretched on for years; any writer would nod knowingly). Actually, I'm glad for the reread because The Prince is an extraordinary (and grossly misunderstood) book. The line that really jumped out at me dramatically, although I've paraphrased it so often over the last decade, is: "For this is an infallible rule: a prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised." It's one of many, many reasons why our current dictator is, has been, and will always be, a terrible ruler. It also helps us understand, in a non-princely fashion, why the rabid followers in his cult can't be made to see their astonishing error.