to see that this is accomplished. However, this does not mean that Machiavelli advocated widespread vice or that he did not understand the need for and the nature of virtue. A morally decadent society would not long stand, and the immorality of the Prince was indeed allowed to enforce the morality of the state itself and to promote morality among the people.
Machiavelli indeed saw Italy as a morally bankrupt country that needed the strong hand of a leader to guide it back to a moral path. Yet, it also seems that "virtue" has a different meaning for Machiavelli than it had for a Christian theorist such as St. Thomas Aquinas. Machiavelli creates two levels of virtue, one for the mass of people and one for the leader. In his view of what the mass should maintain as a moral stance, Machiavelli is closer to Aquinas. Machiavelli may not admire such Christian virtues as humility, but he sees a value in these virtues as controlling agents for the masses. For the Prince, Machiavelli admires the virtues of stre
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