The prince, chapter 7&8. I want to know in-depth in each part of the question and what quotes are there to help me understand.
Out of the trials and tribulations of Cesare Borgia Machiavelli constructs a rise-and-fall saga that is itself a profoundly moving piece of storytelling. Machiavelli, especially in his later works, seemed to prefer to be thought of as an historian, and here he shows off his predilection for spinning the messiness of history into the stuff of great fiction to. That said, Machiavelli does much to undercut and subvert his own tendency to draw larger meanings out of complex events.
For example, Machiavelli posits Borgia as a kind of latter-day mortal equivalent of the legends of history: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus. Where those ancient figures exist shrouded in a haze, their exploits mythologized, Borgia is, for Machiavelli, a contemporary figure, and thus cannot hope to live up to these precedents. He is a flawed man, albeit one equipped with intelligence and courage, and yet when Machiavelli concludes by blaming Cesare’s failure on bad luck, one senses a kind of half-heartedness in the decision. Julius’s rise to the papacy sealed Cesare’s doom, and that rise can be attributed, according to Machiavelli, to a lapse of reason on Cesare’s part: “his only error lay in making Julius pope, where he simply made a bad choice; because, as I said, though he couldn’t make his own man pope, he could keep anyone else from the office.”
