Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli looked at power without flinching and told the world exactly what he saw. A Florentine diplomat, philosopher and historian of the Italian Renaissance, he served the Republic of Florence for fourteen years as secretary of its second chancery, steeped in the machinery of war and statecraft, before the Medici returned and cast him out. In exile he wrote The Prince, that unsparing manual of how rulers seize and hold their thrones, and the Discourses on Livy, which quietly seeded modern republicanism. His name became a byword for cunning, yet the man also wrote comedies, carnival songs and poetry. His Taurus Sun sits in the fifth house, the Sun near its own home: a creative, foundational, deeply Venusian pillar that shone through the written word and prized enduring craft over fashion. Sagittarius rises on his chart, the jolly big-picture philosopher, the wandering preacher forever lecturing on how the world truly works. Yet his Moon in Aquarius, breaking above the horizon in the first house, reveals the real engine: a detached, revolutionary, mission-carrying psyche wired to the collective, coldly clear-eyed about human nature. Often called the father of modern political science, he wore his radical mind on his sleeve.