When Niccolo Machiavelli examines justice, he makes a clear and conscientious choice to disregard many of the teachings passed down from ancient times. The models of justice, as they existed in Ancient Greece in the days of Socrates, evade Machiavelli's writings in a very methodical way. While Machiavelli does acknowledge justice as a phrase, he hardly finds it to be a practical asset of a society worth striving for. Readers of Machiavelli's work have found that unlike other writers of republican concepts, he is very careful to only mention justice in a sparingly manner. These deliberate omissions have come to be a defining staple in the works of Machiavelli. In the event where Machiavelli opts to provide us with a discourse regarding justice, it is almost certainly always accompanied by sharp language, a clear indicator of his disdain for the discussion of such a concept. In this paper, I will examine Machiavelli's linguistic use of "injustice" and "ingratitude" and how he saw their place in his world. As reflected in most of his surviving works, Machiavelli eludes more to the ingratitude and injustices of man as an incredibly necessary trait of a new Roman republic to ensure its strength and sustainability.
While Machiavelli arrives to knowledge of justice by describing the vice and not the virtue, one could argue that the negatives of a circumstance are more impressive, or sometimes are the first to be seen. However these arguments require that people assume that Machiavelli is looking for the positive and is choosing to use the negative to provide a means of highlighting the positive, but this does not seem to be the case. Machiavelli provides an express interest in the topic of ingratitude in the republic. Justice is what is seen as our response to the harms witnessed as ingratitude. It is clear why ingratitude breeds "hatred and compassion among men" (D I 2.