Girolamo Frachetta

Girolamo Frachetta (1558 to 1619) was an Italian Renaissance philosopher and political writer, born in Rovigo, where he studied the humanities with Antonio Riccoboni before studying philosophy with Francesco Piccolomini at Padua. After a degree in law he served Luigi d'Este, Scipione Gonzaga and the Duke of Sessa, the Spanish ambassador in Rome, until for unknown reasons he had to leave Rome and retire to Naples, where the viceroy, the Duke of Benavente, gave him a pension and where he died. In 1589 he published the Breve spositione di tutta l'opera di Lucretio, the first paraphrase of Lucretius' De rerum natura in a vernacular language. In Il prencipe of 1597 and Della ragione di stato of 1623 he treated political and economic questions, proposing taxation of the nobility as a support of social order and holding that political problems should be handled pragmatically and not dogmatically. His main work, Il Seminario de' Governi di Stato et di Guerra, collects about eight thousand maxims on state and war.