ble) that most of these men are
neither abnormal nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they.
They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral atmosphere
which surrounded them; and they were the direct result of the social and
political condition. This may seem no answer; for although we know the
causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the less. What we mean
is not that the existence of men capable of committing such actions was
normal; we mean that the men who committed them, the conditions being
what they were, were not necessarily men of exceptional character. The
level of immorality was so high that a man need be no giant to reach up
into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When to massacre at a banquet
a number of enemies enticed by overtures of peace was considered in
Caesar Borgia merely a rather audacious and not very holy action,
indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then Caesar Borgia
required, to commit such an action, little more than a brilliant
diplomatic endowment, unhampered by scruples and timidity; when a brave,
and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could murder his kinsmen and
commit incest with his sister without being considered less gracious and
magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed be but an indifferent
villain; when treachery, lust, and bloodshed, although objected to in
theory, were condoned In practice, and were regarded as venial sins,
those who indulged in them might be in fact scarcely more than venial
sinners. In short, where a fiendish action might be committed without
the perpetrator being considered a fiend, there was no need of his being
one. And, indeed, the great villains of the Renaissance never take up
the attitude of fiends; one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese,
were madmen, but the others were more or less normal human beings. There
was no barrier between them and evil; they slipped into it, remained in
it, became accustomed to it; but a vicious determination to be wicked, a
feeling of the fiend within one, like that of Shakespeare's Richard, or
a gradual, conscious irresistible absorption into recognized iniquity
like Macbeth's, there was not. The mere sense of absolute power and
impunity, together with the complete silence of the conscience of the
public at large, can make a man do strange things. If Caesar Borgia be
free to practise his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not
practise it upon these prisoners