coldhearted scientist وداد

The Enchantress of Florence. The mob went after Machiavelli when he lost power

“These people were good people, thought il Machia, these few people of his own, but in general the people of Florence were traitors. It was the people who had betrayed the republic and invited the Medici back. The people whom he had served as a true republican, as secretary of the Second Chancery, traveling diplomat, and founder of the Florentine militia, had betrayed him. After the fall of the republic and the dismissal of the gonfaloniere Pier Soderini, the chief of the republic’s governing body, il Machia too had been dismissed. After fourteen years of loyal service the people had shown that they did not care about loyalty. The people were fools for power. They had allowed il Machia to be taken down into the underground bowels of the city where the torturers waited. Such a people did not deserve to be cared for. They did not deserve a republic. Such a people deserved a despot. Perhaps this was what all people were like, everywhere, always excepting these rustics with whom he drank and played cards and triche-tach, and a few old friends, Agostino Vespucci, for instance, thank God they had not tortured Ago, he was not strong, he would have confessed to anything, everything, and then they would have killed him, unless he died during the torture, of course. But they had not wanted Ago, who was il Machia’s junior. It was il Machia they had wanted to kill. They did not deserve him. These rustics deserved him but in general the people deserved their cruel beloved princes. The pain that had coursed through his body was not pain but knowledge. It was an educative pain that broke the last fragments of his trust in the people. He had served the people and they had paid him in pain, in that lightless subterranean place, that place without a name in which nameless people did nameless things to bodies that were also nameless because names did not matter there, only pain mattered, pain followed by confession followed by death. The people had wanted his death, or at least had not cared if he lived or died. In the city that gave the world the idea of the value and freedom of the individual human soul they had not valued him and cared not a fig for his soul’s freedom, nor his body’s integrity neither. He had given them fourteen years of honest and honorable service and they had not cared for his sovereign individual life, for his human right to remain alive. Such a people were to be set aside. They were incapable of love or justice and therefore did not signify. Such a people no longer mattered. They were not primary but secondary. Only despots mattered. The love of the people was fickle and inconstant and to pursue such a love was folly. There was no love. There was only power.”

Axé.