among the theorists of classical republicanism. Niccolò Machiavelli was the first to revive him, but not (at first) in the republican model which Bruni and others had followed. One quotation from the Annals (13.19) appears in The Prince (ch. 13), advising the ruler that "it has always been the opinion and judgment of wise men that nothing can be so uncertain or unstable as fame or power not founded on its own strength". The idealized Prince bears some resemblance to Tacitus's Tiberius; a few (most notably Giuseppe Toffanin) have argued that Machiavelli had made more use of Tacitus than he let on. In fact, though, Machiavelli had probably not read the first books of the Annals at that time—they were published after The Prince. In his work focused mainly on republicanism, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, Machiavelli returned to Bruni's republican perspective on Tacitus. Four overt references appear in the work. Chapter 1.10 follows Tacitus (Histories 1.1), and Bruni, on the chilling effects of monarchy. Chapter 1.29 quotes the Histories (4.3) on the burden of gratitude and the pleasure of revenge. Chapter 3.6 quotes Tacitus: "men have to honor things past but obey the present, and ought to desire good Princes, but tolerate the ones they have". 3.19 twists a line from Tacitus (3.55) into something very similar to Machiavelli's famous maxim that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. (The original made a very different point: that respect for the Emperor and a desire to conform, not fear and punishment, kept certain senators in line.) Many covert references appear: Machiavelli generally follows Tacitus's decidedly negative slant on the history of Rome under the Emperors. Machiavelli had read Tacitus for instruction on forms of government, republican as well as autocratic, but after his books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, writers on political philosophy (the so-called "black Tacitists"—see above) frequently used the Roman as a stand-in for the Florentine, and the Emperor Tiberius as a mask for Machiavelli's model of a prince. So, writers like Francesco Guicciardini considered Tacitus' work to be an instruction on how to build a despotic state. Following that line of thought (Catholics in appearance reading Tacitus instead of Machiavelli's still forbidden Prince), the thinkers of the Counter-Reformation and the age of absolute monarchies used his works as a set of rules and principles for political action. Girolamo