Machiavelli names Xenophon's Cyrus in The Prince as a model a new ruler should study, and Cyrus is one of the handful of examples he returns to when arguing how a man without inherited title takes and holds a state. The relationship is a disagreement as much as a debt, which is what makes it worth drawing. The Cyropaedia is an idealising education of a ruler, arguing that Cyrus succeeded by generosity, justice and being loved. Machiavelli reads the same career and draws the opposite lesson about fear and love, and scholars have long noted that his Cyrus does things Xenophon's book quietly records but does not commend. He is reading the text against its own moral.