Immortality versus eternity - Machiavelli and the call to civic glory

What is the consequence of taking Machiavel's paganism seriously? The prese nt article studies the radical difference which the question creates in the conception of time, particularly in the Discorsi, in which Machiavel, foll owing Polybius, tries to convince the Florentines of the late fifteenth cen tury to go back to the virtu antica and compares the old Romans to the Flor entines of the Renaissance. Cyclical time increases the exemplarity of hero ic times: caught by repetition, human activity can only survive through civ ic and collective memory. On the contrary, the linear time of Christianity produces a temporal split: private consciousness must disengage itself from its earthly destiny in order to identify with the eternal fate of the soul . In proposing civic glory and the figure of the virtuoso citizen against e ternal salvation and the homo viator, Machiavel's paganism seems to be a ne cessity of his political thought.