Explore "Discourses on Livy" by Niccolò Machiavelli on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That when great calamities are about to befall a city or country, signs are seen to presage, and seers arise who foretell them.
Whence it happens I know not, but it is seen from examples both ancient and recent, that no grave calamity has ever befallen any city or country which has not been foretold by vision, by augury, by portent, or by some other heaven-sent sign. And not to travel too far afield for evidence of this, everyone knows that long before the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France, his coming was foretold by the friar Girolamo Savonarola; and how, throughout the whole of Tuscany, the rumour ran that over Arezzo horsemen had been seen fighting in the air. And who is there who has not heard that before the death of the elder Lorenzo de' Medici, the highest pinnacle of the cathedral was rent by a thunderbolt, to the great injury of the building? Or who, again, but knows that shortly before Piero Soderini, whom the people of Florence had made gonfalonier for life, was deprived of his office and banished, the palace itself was struck by lightning?