One evening he wandered on the Palatine Hill, where had stood the palaces of Augustus, Caligula, and Septimius Severus. Now only the wind howled in the ruins, and among the olives and the acanthus was heard the bleating of sheep and the chirrup of the grasshopper. The ground was strewn with marble fragments, and Leonardo knew that statues of rare beauty of the gods and heroes of the ancient world were buried under the ruins, like dead men awaiting the resurrection. The evening was serene and fair; the brick skeletons of arches, vaults, and walls, glowed fiery in the rays of the sinking sun. The autumn foliage was all scarlet and gold, as once had been the chambers of the Roman emperors.
On the northern slope of the hill, not far from the gardens of Capranica, Leonardo knelt to examine a fragment of marble. At this moment a man appeared on the tangled footpath.
'Is it you, Messer Niccolò?' said Leonardo, rising and embracing him.
The Florentine secretary seemed still shabbier than when Leonardo had made his acquaintance on the road to Fano; it was evident that the Signoria still neglected him. He was thin, his shaven cheeks seemed quite blue, his long neck bent wearily, his nose seemed more prominent and beak-like, his eyes more fevered. Leonardo asked him of his whereabouts and his affairs; but when he spoke of Cæsar, Niccolò turned away, shrugging his shoulders and replying with simulated indifference:—
'I have seen strange things in my life; I no longer wonder at anything;' and then he fell to questioning Leonardo as if anxious to change the subject. When he heard that his friend had entered the service of Florence, Machiavelli cried:—
'Be not elated! God only knows which is the worse, the crimes of a hero like Cæsar, or the virtues of our ant-hill of a republic. Oh, I know the beauties of a popular government!' and he smiled bitterly.
Leonardo told him Giustiniani's parable of the hens and the foxes, the sheep and the wolves.
'Truth remains truth,' said Niccolò, restored to good humour. 'True, I irritate the hens and the foxes too; they are ready to burn me at the stake for being the first to describe what they have all being doing ever since the world began. The tyrants think me an inciter to revolution, the populace believe me in league with the tyrants, the religious call me an infidel, the good call me wicked, and the wicked hate me more than they all because I seem to them more wicked than themselves. Ah, Messer Leonardo, do you recall our conversations? You and I have a common fate. The discovery of new truths is, and has ever been, more dangerous than discovery of new lands. You and I are solitary in a crowd, strangers, superfluous, homeless wanderers, perpetual outcasts. He who is unlike others is alone against all; for the world has been created for the masses, and outside the vulgar no one is anything. Ay, my friend, this is a serious matter, for it means that life is tedious; and the worst misfortune in life is not sickness, nor poverty, nor grief; but tediousness.'
In silence they descended the western slope of the Palatine, and by the Via della Consolazione reached the foot of the Capitol, the ruins of the temple of Saturn, the place where in the days of glory had stood the Forum Romanum.
From the Arch of Septimius Severus, as far as to the Flavian amphitheatre, the Via Sacra was flanked by wretched hovels. Their foundations were formed of fragments of statues, of the limbs and torsos of Olympian gods. For centuries the forum had been a quarry. Christian churches languished on the ruins of pagan shrines. Layer upon layer of street rubbish, of dust, of filth, had raised the level of the ground more than ten cubits. Yet still lofty columns soared upwards and carried sculptured architraves—last traces of a vanished art.