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Machiavelli's Imagination of Excellent Men: An Appraisal of the Lives of Cosimo de' Medici and Castruccio Castracani

For the education of princes Machiavelli recommends the true lives of “excellent men” rather than the “imagination” of how one should live, yet, the lives Machiavelli wrote tell a different story. While his relatively accurate life of Cosimo de' Medici offers lessons in deceit and faithlessness, it is a life to be admired rather than imitated. By contrast, the Life of Castruccio Castracani is worthy of imitation, as it teaches the use of force as well as fraud, but it is mostly the product of an imagination enriched by ancient histories. Machiavelli taught the “effectual truth” by sketching the imaginary life of a modern prince because contemporaries would not imitate an ancient one. Moreover, the failure of even the imaginary Castruccio to master fortune indicates that the man of deeds needs the author's ability to imagine a particular life as an education for others.