 Machiavelli recognizes that he is adopting an unusual perspective, since customarily the blame for the collapse of the Roman Republic has been assigned to warring factions that eventually ripped it apart. By contrast, he insists that precisely those conflicts generated a “creative tension” that was the source of Roman liberty. Other republican models (such as those adopted by Sparta or Venice) produced weaker political systems, ones that are either stagnant or prone to decay when circumstances change. The ultimate sign of the unique greatness of the Roman Republic is its conquest of huge amounts of territory, as a result of the grandi and the popolo setting aside their ultimately interminable struggles (at least for a time) in order to cooperate in the subjugation and exploitation of vast lands. Class struggle is thus socialized and put to effective use. It has been suggested, and with good reason, that a signal element of Machiavelli’s political project was to promote Florence as the new Rome that will impose its domination over the rest of Italy. It is perhaps not too great a stretch to call him a civic humanist with imperialistic pretensions (Hörnqvist 2004).