During his years as an ambassador and emissary to various Italian and foreign governments, he had ample opportunities to observe rulers and ruled in action, and to draw the conclusions that appear in his celebrated works of political thought. As a result, Machiavelli spent the next few years of his life in futile effort to regain his political stature in the city while engaging in the production of books, plays, and poems. The most important of these, The Mandragola, was written in 1518. In it Machiavelli attempts to transpose into the Italian urban life of his day the kinds of comic patterns that he had learned from a reading of the Roman playwrights, particularly Plautus. The Mandragola , which in form and content seems totally different from Machiavelli's political thought, does, in fact, represent what might e called the Machiavellism of the boudoir.
Seduction becomes a game of strategy.
Personalities are only sketched in, or entirely subordinate to the ways in which the characters manipulate one another. And the comedy speaks in a surprisingly contemporary voice about such vexing issues as gender differences, morality, and even abortion. He bases his analysis both on his readings of Greek and Roman history and also his acute observations of the behavior of the Italian, German, and French princes of his own time. The book is best known for the way in which it challenges received assumptions about the morality of princely behavior. As a result, Machiavelli, for many centuries was regarded as the quintessence a of the villain, devil who tempts people to make the worse appear the better cause.