serves their purposes' but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails (Ebenstein 194).
Lest his readers draw the wrong lessons, Machiavelli urged leaders to be "cautious in believing and acting" . . . [and to] "proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity" (Ebenstein 193). He particularly urged a prince not to "make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred" (Ebenstein 194).
Caesar was born into a fairly prosperous patrician family. He was exposed during his late childhood to the political conspiracies that enveloped early first century Rome. According to Duggan, he learned early that "politics was a dangerous business in which death was often the penalty of failure" (31). Caesar's illustrious military career in command of Roman legions began later after he was 42. He briefly displayed his courage as a young officer at the age of 18 with the Army in Greece. He then went on during the next two decades to a promising career as an ambitious aristocratic politician holding a number of junior and middle level positions. As a young man, he displayed a tendency to be headstrong and to evince an attitude that suggested that he believed the ordinary customs and rules of society did not apply to him. At 18 he married the daughter of an individual who was considered a dangerous revolutionary which earned him a personal rebuke from Rome's temporary dictator Sulla. Duggan says that Caesar showed then and on a number of other occasions "his only weakness, a lack of sympathy with his fellow citizens --which sometimes led him to outrage public opinion through sheer ignorance of the manner in which his actions would strike his contemporaries" (41). He shrugged off criticism of his brief homosexual affair with a senior Roman general abroad which helped further his career.
Caesar was unabashedly ambitious and would make deals with whatever politicians he needed to ...