Volokh got into Discourses on Livy which has a new translation By Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard classics prof, who wrote a probably unpopular book on Masculinity this year. 'Discourses' is available at our library as an ebook, the first one I have gotten into. Anyway, the quote they take from Machiavelli in Volokh seems to rather sum up Iranian behavior. One of the interesting things about Machiavelli is that he believed republican and other conflict was inevitable, rather like Adam Smith who saw an 'invisible (beneficial) hand' in organizing the self interests of men (and women) properly. Political theory at the time was inclined to the idea of a patriarchal, beneficent ruler, rather like the statist views of today and the last century.