E who is great shall never lack for enemies. He has to reckon first with lesser great ones, whose ambitions he thwarts by his own success, outstripping and overshadowing them; and he has to reckon further with those insignificant parasites of humanity who, themselves utterly unproductive of aught that shall benefit their race, destitute alike of the wit to conceive for themselves or the energy and capacity to execute the conceptions of their betters, writhe in the secret consciousness of their utter worthlessness and spit the venom of their malice at him who has achieved renown. In this they no more than obey the impulses of their paltry natures, the dictates of their foolish narrow vanity. The greatness of another wounds them in their own self-love. They readily become detractors and defamers, conceiving that if in the public mind they can pull down the object of their envy, they have lessened the gulf between themselves and him. Fluent—if undeceiving—liars, they go to work through the medium of that their sole and very questionable gift. They lie of their own prowess, importance and achievement, that thus they may puff themselves up to an apparently greater stature, and they lie maliciously and cruelly concerning the object of their envy, belittling his attainments, slandering the object of their envy, belittling his attainments, slandering him in his private and public life, and smothering his repute in the slime of their foul inventions.
By such signs shall you know them—for a fool is ever to be known by those two qualities: his inordinate vanity and his falsehood, which usually is no more than an expression of that vanity. But his falsehood, being naturally of the measure of his poor intelligence, deceives none but his own kind.
Such a thing was Messer Paolo Capello, Orator of the Most Serene Republic, a servant chosen to forward the Venetian hatred of Cesare Borgia. Venice watched the Duke's growing power in Italy with ever-increasing dismay. She saw herself threatened by a serious rival in the peninsula, by one indeed who might come to eclipse her own resplendent glory, even if he did not encroach upon her mainland territories of which indeed she was by no means sure. That jealousy of hers distorted her judgement of him, for she permitted herself judgement and applied to him the only canons that she knew, as if men of genius are to be judged by the standards that govern the lives of haberdashers and spice-merchants. Thus Venice became Cesare's most crafty, implacable enemy in Italy, and an enemy for whose hand no weapon was too vile.
Gladly would the Venetians have moved in arms against him, to attempt to crush this man who snatched the Romagna from under their covetous traders' eyes; but in view of the league with France they dared not. Yet what they dared they did. They sought to disturb his relations with King Louis, and failing there, they sought alliances with other States to which normally they were hostile, and when there again they failed, thanks to a guile more keen and intelligent than their own, they had recourse to the common weapons of the assassin and the slanderer.
For the latter task they had a ready tool in that ineffable and worthless Messer Capello, sometime their Orator at the Vatican; for the former, another of whom we shall hear more presently.
This Capello was of the slipperiness of all slimy things. And he worked in the dark, burrowing underground and never affording the Duke a plain reason that should have justified extreme measures against the sacred person of an ambassador. How he came to escape assassination in the early days of his infamous career I have never understood. I look upon its omission as one of Cesare Borgia's few really great blunders. A hired bravo with a dagger on some dark night might have stemmed that source of foulness, leaving the name of Cesare Borgia and of every member of his family less odious to posterity.