The success which attended the violence and dissimulation of the Romans, as described by Livy, induced him to inculcate the principles on which they acted.

The scientific method followed by Aristotle in the Politics encouraged him in the adoption of a similar analysis; while the close parallel between ancient Greece and mediaeval Italy was sufficient to create a conviction that the wisdom of the old world would be precisely applicable to the conditions of the new.

These, however, are exculpations of the man rather than justifications of his theory.

The theory was false and vicious.

And the fact remains that the man, impregnated by the bad morality of the period in which he lived, was incapable of ascending above it to the truth, was impotent with all his acumen to read the deepest lessons of past and present history, and in spite of his acknowledged patriotism succeeded only in adding his conscious and unconscious testimony to the corruption of the country that he loved.
The broad common-sense, the mental soundness, the humane instinct and the sympathy with nature, which give fertility and wholeness to the political philosophy of men like Burke, are absent in Machiavelli.