Virtu in the City of Florence

In his last six years of life, machiavelli tried hard to devise a constitution capable of balancing the city's social classes. But even heknew that this on its own would not be enough. As he had already pointed out, any settlement would eventually be destroyed by vice. If social conflict was to be kept within acceptable bounds therefore a dose of virtue would have to be injected into the body politic. By looking carefully at rome's period of liberty, Machiavelli identified four methods of reviving astates virtu.