What if the true heir of the Roman Empire was not Rome, but Florence? Over the course of his life and career as a scholar and politician, the great humanist Leonardo Bruni made this argument multiple times, and in a variety of ways. In doing so, he gave novel accounts of liberty and virtue, and eventually moved away from an appeal to Florence's Roman roots and appealed instead to her Etruscan roots. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for the preeminent Italian political thinker commonly associated with the birth of modernity: Niccolò Machiavelli.
New Humanists episode on Leonardo Bruni's letter to Battista Malatesta: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/14460440-mediocrity-versus-glory-in-the-renaissance-episode-lxii
James Hankins's Virtue Politics: https://amzn.to/3UiQpp3
Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780674005068
C.S. Lewis's The Weight of Glory: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780060653200
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781107612235
Donatello's Saint George: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_(Donatello)
Roberto Valturio's De re militari: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=315
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Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
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