Machiavelli pioneered fusing political ideology with science as myth

Evidence

The basic thing about The Prince is that it is not a systematic treatment, but a “live” work, in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of a “myth”. Before Machiavelli, political science had taken the form either of the Utopia or of the scholarly treatise. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 596