How long does it take to read The Prince?
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli takes about 2 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 56 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1515. 160 pages, about 44,000 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 50 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1,590 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Prince (Italian: Il Principe [il ˈprintʃipe]; Latin: De Principatibus) is a 16th-century political treatise written by Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli as an instruction guide for new princes and royals. The general theme of The Prince is of accepting that the aims of princes – such as glory and survival – can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends. From Machiavelli's correspondence, a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (Of Principalities). However, the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was carried out with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of The Prince in manuscript, controversy had swirled about his writings". Although The Prince was written as if it were a traditional work in the mirrors for princes style, it was generally agreed as being especially innovative. This is partly because it was written in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin, a practice that had become increasingly popular since the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy and other works of Renaissance literature.
Subjects: Fiction, Science politique, Morale politique, Political science, Political ethics, Contribution à la philosophie politique
