 Drawing on a wide range of classical sources, above all Tacitus, Lipsius’s subject in the treatise was specifically how to rule principalities. While political thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and many others had already written on this topic, they had dealt with it more generally, not in relation to principalities. The one important exception was Machiavelli, who “led his prince along the right way to the temple of virtue and honor,” but “while pursuing the path of utility, he wandered from the royal road.” The humanist Lipsius intended to be practical but to avoid any concrete and contemporary applications of the general principles he set out.