rankness, and his words are the exact
keynote of the ethics of his age. He relates how Julius II ventured into
Perugia, although Giampolo Baglione had gathered a large number of
troops there, and how the latter, overawed by the Pope, surrendered the
city to him. His comment is verbatim as follows: "People of judgment who
were with the Pope wondered at his foolhardiness, and at Giampolo's
cowardice; they could not understand why the latter did not, to his
everlasting fame, crush his enemy with one blow and enrich himself with
the plunder, for the Pope was accompanied by all his cardinals with
their jewels. They could not believe that he refrained on account of any
goodness or any conscientious scruples, for the heart of a wicked man,
who committed incest with his sister, and destroyed his cousins and
nephews so he might rule, could not be accessible to any feelings of
respect. So they came to the conclusion that there are men who can
neither be honorably bad nor yet perfectly good, who do not know how to
go about committing a crime, great in itself or possessing a certain
splendor. This was the case with Giampolo; he who thought nothing of
incest and the murder of his kinsmen did not know how, or rather did not
dare, in spite of the propitious moment, to perform a deed which would
have caused every one to admire his courage, and would have won for him
an immortal name. For he would first have shown the priests how small
men are in reality who live and rule as they do, and he would have been
the first to accomplish a deed whose greatness would have dazzled every
one, and would have removed every danger which might have arisen from
it."

Is it any wonder that in view of such a prostitution of morals to the
conception of success, fame, and magnificence, as Macchiavelli here and
in _Il Principe_ advocates, men like the Borgias found the widest field
for their bold crimes? They well knew that the greatness of a crime
concealed the shame of it. The celebrated poet Strozzi in Ferrara placed
Caesar Borgia, after his fall, among the heroes of Olympus; and the
famous Bembo, one of the first men of the age, endeavors to console
Lucretia Borgia on the death of the "miserable little" Alexander VI,
whom he at the same time calls her "great" father.

No upright man, conscious of his own worth, would now enter the service
of a prince stained by such crimes as were the Borgias, if it were
possible for such a one now to exist, which is w