all his actions,
accompanied only by his body-guard, he committed himself into the
hands of his enemy, whom he forthwith carried away with him, leaving a
governor behind to hold the town for the Church. All prudent men who
were with the Pope remarked on his temerity, and on the pusillanimity of
Giovanpagolo; nor could they conjecture why the latter had not, to his
eternal glory, availed himself of this opportunity for crushing his
enemy, and at the same time enriching himself with plunder, the Pope
being attended by the whole College of Cardinals with all their
luxurious equipage. For it could not be supposed that he was withheld
by any promptings of goodness or scruples of conscience; because in the
breast of a profligate living in incest with his sister, and who to
obtain the princedom had put his nephews and kinsmen to death, no
virtuous impulse could prevail. So that the only inference to be drawn
was, that men know not how to be splendidly wicked or wholly good, and
shrink in consequence from such crimes as are stamped with an
inherent greatness or disclose a nobility of nature. For which reason
Giovanpagolo, who thought nothing of incurring the guilt of incest, or
of murdering his kinsmen, could not, or more truly durst not, avail
himself of a fair occasion to do a deed which all would have admired;
which would have won for him a deathless fame as the first to teach
the prelates how little those who live and reign as they do are to be
esteemed; and which would have displayed a greatness far transcending
any infamy or danger that could attach to it.

CHAPTER XXVIII.--_Whence it came that the Romans were less ungrateful to
their Citizens than were the Athenians_.

In the histories of all republics we meet with instances of some sort of
ingratitude to their great citizens, but fewer in the history of Rome
than of Athens, or indeed of any other republic. Searching for the cause
of this, I am persuaded that, so far as regards Rome and Athens, it was
due to the Romans having had less occasion than the Athenians to look
upon their fellow-citizens with suspicion For, from the expulsion of her
kings down to the times of Sylla and Marius, the liberty of Rome was
never subverted by any one of her citizens; so that there never was in
that city grave cause for distrusting any man, and in consequence making
him the victim of inconsiderate injustice. The reverse was notoriously
the case with Athens; for that city, having,