And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, The Teacher of Our Actions, Renaissance Historiography.

They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but Machiavelli would say that this gets things

backwards. The reason to study history is precisely so that you can repeat it

solving new problems with solutions that have worked in the past.

As Machiavelli says in his discourses on the Roman historian Livy,

he who wishes to see what is to come should observe what has already happened. In particular, we should look back to antiquity when the Romans provided examples for anyone who seeks to achieve great things, especially in matters of war. Thus he has his main speaker in a dialogue called On the Art of War say,

I shall never depart in giving examples of anything from my Romans.

Admittedly, history can also instruct us on what not to do.

This is the sort of lesson we can learn from more recent history, thinks Machiavelli,

since so many bad decisions have been made by Italian statesmen in general and by the city of Florence in particular.

As my grandfather liked to say, everyone is useful if only to serve as a bad example.

The disparaging remark about Florence comes at the beginning of the fifth book of Machiavelli's history of the city, which was written in the early 1520s at the behest of a Pope

who was also a member of the Medici family.

The project was not, to put it mildly, a novel one.

A series of men who held the office of Chancellor in the 1400s had each written a history of Florence,

beginning with Leonardo Bruni, followed by Poggio Brachonini, and then Bartolomeo Scala.

More generally, historical research had been part of the humanist movement at least since Petrok, who did fundamental philological work restoring the writings of Livy.

The humanists like to say that history is the teacher of our actions, precisely

because of the wealth of examples it offers for emulation, and its study was an important

part of the study of rhetoric.

Both points are made by a humanist we met some episodes back, Isota Nogarola.

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