What is truly meant by "Machiavellian"? Explore the book to seek answers. Possessed of a great intellect, Niccolò Machiavelli was uniquely suited to examine and explain the important details of statecraft. Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. With these writings, he has influenced the history of the world.