Abstract

Renaissance Italy's first rebirthing was of its own Latin heritage: Livy, Horace, Ovid, Cicero. Its second character was informed by the newly-discovered and translated Egyptian and Greek ancients: Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Plotinus. Until at least the 17th century, when Enlightenment scholar Isaac Casaubon redated the Hermes writings to the 1-3rd centuries C.E., Hermes Trismegistus was known to the Western world as the most ancient, and thus most reverred, prisca sapientia. ;By the mid-1400's, Cardinal Bessarion and Gemisthus Pletho were the foremost teachers of Greek to avid Italian scholars. Humanists of the day commissioned searches for ancient Greek writings. By 1463, Cosimo de' Medici's scholar Marsilio Ficino had translated several of the age's greatest finds: fourteen of Hermes' treatises, and several of Plato's and Plotinus' works. ;The Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance developed under the leadership and the schools of Giovanni Pontano of Naples and Marsilio Ficino of Florence. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazarelli, Francesco da Diacceto, Pope Alexander VI, and Cosimo de' Medici were some of the other mid-and-late 15th century students of the prisci theologi, which included, as one of Ficino's lists states, Zoroaster, Mercurious Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, and Plato. ;Interest in the ancient philosophers continued into the 15th century with Lafevre d'Etaples , Symphorien Champier , Reuchlin , Henry Cornelius Agrippa , Paracelsus , and Pompanazzi . ;The above scholars contributed to one aspect of Niccolo Machiavelli's cultural milieu. The objective of the present study is to discover the influence of Hermetic/Neoplatonic concepts and images upon the work of Machiavelli. This will be done by looking at Machiavelli's personal letters , his political works, and his drama and poetry . ;It will be found that Machiavelli does know about Hermetic and Neoplatonic concepts and images. In his political treatises, he discusses fortuna and astrology as he understands these long-respected forces. In his poetry and his plays Machiavelli uses Hermetic images more frequently: still for his own literary purposes, yet without negating the character and the power of their Hermetic/Neoplatonic origin