The Dialogi of Antonio Brucioli, printed in the three editions published in Venice between 1526 and 1545, constitute an interesting testimony of the first ‘fortune’ of Machiavelli’s works (whose words Brucioli was able to listen in meetings of the ‘Orti oricellari’); this was clearly recognised by Giuliano Procacci and Carlo Dionisotti, who studied the Machiavellian presence in Brucioli’s strictly political dialogues. This study focuses on a dialogue on an ‘existential’ topic (Dello stato dell’uomo). In the passage from the first to the second edition the theses of the dialogue pass from a radical Lucretian passimism, to positions typical of Stoicism, directly inspired by Seneca’s De breuitate uitae. The dialogue, which opened the collection in 1526, testifies to Lucretius’s fortune at the Orti oricellari and in the lessons of Machiavelli (who, in his youth, had transcribed the De rerum natura – see Vat. Lat. Ross. 884), witnessing a heterodox and paradoxical vocation (these are the years in which Machiavelli wrote the unfinished Asino) which probably indicates in the meetings of the Orti oricellari one of the first attestations of the proto-modern libertine thought, which was so nourished by Epicurean-Lucretian thought.