. He even described an ideal of a republic that would last forever. He greatly admired the equilibrium of the ancient Roman Republic in contrast to the Roman imperial period. Machiavelli drew our attention to the very issue, against which many of his contemporaries attacked: namely faction, the fact that competing groups of interest, that kept the Roman Republic in a state of dynamism, actually guaranteed the Republic’s stability, simultaneously indicating that the high civic virt of not only the regime but amongst all the Republic’s citizens, was maintained – virt in the active and even heroic sense of Pericles, Cicero, and the heralds of the Italian Renaissance.For Machiavelli, like for the Renaissance defenders of political liberty and independence in general, the decay of Rome began with the emergence of coercive and imperial rule, and simultaneous loss of individual virt, the spirit of liberty, which alone encouraged the virtuous individuals for great deeds, and brought prosperity to the whole community. They thought the rise of the imperial regime was the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire, which, by losing its virt, also lost its legitimacy, and finally also stability. Rome is not the only empire that came to its dusk in this way. Thereby, those, who are citing Machiavelli in defence of imperialism, or in defence of forceful preservation of empires that have come to their dusk and moral decadence, are actually misusing Machiavelli.However, to return to the issue of terror, a notice can probably be made that however cynically Machiavelli might have excused terror as a means of advocating a regime’s ultimate mission, even he greatly despised harsh and excessive, entirely non-virtuous, use of terror and violence without succeeding in bringing about any of the claimed goals – goals that, for a cynical politician, might have justified the lack of virtue in the means. Excessive use of terror but inc...
