Machiavelli's Paradoxes

The more he tried to expose the prosaic truth
about how effective statesmanship relies on lies,
the less palatable his version of how power works became.
Until what he had written was shared only privately in his lifetime.
Only posthumously was 'The Prince' was fully published.
It was banned soon after. Later it was the private reading.
of many many emperors and future world leaders.
The more he exposed how to make lies successful,
the more those lies stuck to him, not his later readers
or their followers.
For his repeating the leadership formulas of The Medicis,
his original private audience he came to own their sins.
The more his name was blackened by those lies
among a diminishing reading public, the more the public
were banned from either reading or believing what he written.
This was less to preserve the tattered remains of what was left
of his reputation for telling the truth, more to stop them
believing that what he had written about how lies worked
in the past might apply now-in the present and the future.
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