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 wholly unlikely.

But then the best and most upright of men sought, without any scruples whatever, the presence and favors of the Borgias.

Pinturicchio and Perugino painted for Alexander VI, and the most wonderful genius of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, did not hesitate to enter the service of Caesar Borgia as his engineer, to erect fortresses for him in the same Romagna which he had appropriated by such devilish means.
The men of the Renaissance were in a high degree energetic and creative; they shaped the world with a revolutionary energy and a feverish activity, in comparison with which the modern processes of civilization almost vanish.