In fact, there was only one Renaissance reader who paid any significant attention to the atomist passages [in Lucretius's De rerum natura ]– those which contain the idea of ‘the swerve’, made to do so much work by Greenblatt – Niccolò Machiavelli. Indeed, Machiavelli had transcribed De rerum natura by his own hand and it had a profound effect on his thinking. As Paul Rohe argues, ‘by 1517 or so, if not well before, Machiavelli had made Lucretius’ repudiation of religion and his rejection of natural teleology his own.’ Machiavelli’s knowledge of Epicureanism arguably underpins three aspects of his thinking: his hard materialism, his concept of fortune (that the nature of reality is fundamentally chaotic), and his rather dim and cynical view of human motives. Consider this passage in Discourses on Livy (1531):


We can see here how Machiavelli inherits the Epicurean view that people are naturally inclined to seek out pleasure, and that they have free will, but this takes on a fundamentally ambitious character which brings humans up to the limits of an unpredictable world, which they cannot control. Humans are thus in a perpetual state of anxiety because their desire can never be fulfilled. Unlike Epicurus, whose entire moral system can be seen as a kind of therapeutic coping mechanism to help people live a life freed from such anxieties, Machiavelli proposes no real solutions. Rather, he insists that we must recognise the reality of the situation; we cannot try to avoid or hide from ‘every type of filth’, because human vices exist in every age. It is on this recognition, of course, that Machiavelli builds his amoral political consequentialism in The Prince (1532): ‘For a man who wants to practice goodness in all situations is inevitably destroyed, among so many men who are not good.’
The nature of human desire in Machiavelli has an at times palpably capitalist character, as he seems to think that people value property and possessions more than the lives of others. In a letter to Giovanni de’ Medici (the future Pope Leo X) in 1512, he writes:


He echoes this later in The Prince: ‘Men are quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of an inheritance.’ Again we can see some traces of Epicureanism here: property produces both avarice and loss aversion, and death is annihilation.