are entirely excluded.
And in Venice this occasions no disturbance, for reasons which I have
already explained.

Let a commonwealth, then, be constituted in the country where a great
equality is found or has been made; and, conversely, let a princedom
be constituted where great inequality prevails. Otherwise what is
constituted will be discordant in itself, and without stability.

CHAPTER LVI.--_That when great Calamities are about to befall a City or
Country, Signs are seen to presage, and Seers arise who foretell them_.

Whence it happens I know not, but it is seen from examples both ancient
and recent, that no grave calamity has ever befallen any city or country
which has not been foretold by vision, by augury, by portent, or by some
other Heaven-sent sign. And not to travel too far afield for evidence of
this, every one knows that long before the invasion of Italy by
Charles VIII. of France, his coming was foretold by the friar Girolamo
Savonarola; and how, throughout the whole of Tuscany, the rumour ran
that over Arezzo horsemen had been seen fighting in the air. And who is
there who has not heard that before the death of the elder Lorenzo de'
Medici, the highest pinnacle of the cathedral was rent by a thunderbolt,
to the great injury of the building? Or who, again, but knows that
shortly before Piero Soderini, whom the people of Florence had made
gonfalonier for life, was deprived of his office and banished, the
palace itself was struck by lightning?

Other instances might be cited, which, not to be tedious, I shall omit,
and mention only a circumstance which Titus Livius tells us preceded
the invasion of the Gauls. For he relates how a certain plebeian named
Marcus Ceditius reported to the senate that as he passed by night along
the Via Nova, he heard a voice louder than mortal, bidding him warn the
magistrates that the Gauls were on their way to Rome.

The causes of such manifestations ought, I think, to be inquired into
and explained by some one who has a knowledge, which I have not, of
causes natural and supernatural. It may, however, be, as certain wise
men say, that the air is filled with intelligent beings, to whom it is
given to forecast future events; who, taking pity upon men, warn them
beforehand by these signs to prepare for what awaits them. Be this as it
may, certain it is that such warnings are given, and that always after
them new and strange disasters befall nations.

CHAPTER LVII.--