While he was speaking, his son, Piero, came into the room with some wine for them, which he put upon the table. He was not unlike his father, with a small, close-cropped head and slightly aquiline nose, but the face had the softer outline and delicacy of youth; something in the clean-cut features, the thoughtful brows, and firm lips, reminded Cromwell of a little head of Augustus upon a gem which he had seen at Rome, but even more, of a small head of Caligula, that debased and weaker image of Augustus. Machiavelli smiled, took his son's hand, and talked to him in that spirit of grave banter which is customary with men when they talk to children, and the boy answered him readily enough, with responsive smiles, and laughingly, but yet a little embarrassed by the presence of their guest. Presently his hand was released, and he slipped silently out of the room.
"It is sad when one thinks of the great empires of the past fallen into decay, and all their work perished, so that nothing of them can be said to remain except a shadowy legend and a name."
"Yes, it is sad; but it hath always been so," answered Machiavelli. "Everything is subject to change and death. Do you know these lines of Dante, since you study him?
"'_Atene e Lacedemone, che fenno Le antiche leggi, e furon sì civili, Fecero al viver bene un picciol cenno Verso di te, che fai tanto sottili Provvedimenti, che a mezzo novembre Non giunge quel che tu d'ottobre fili._'
"They are nothing but a song in our ears. And yet we may comfort ourselves. For I believe that the world has always been the same and has always contained an equal mass of good and evil, but I believe also that this good and evil passes from one country to another, as we may see by the records of these kingdoms of antiquity, which, as their manners changed, passed from one to the other, but the world itself remained the same. There is only this difference, that whereas first the seat of the world's greatness was at Assyria, whence it passed to the Medes, thence into Persia, until finally it came to Rome and Italy, and though no other Empire has followed which has proved lasting, yet now the greatness of the world is diffused through many nations, in which men live in orderly and civil fashion. Everything is subject to change and the vicissitudes of fortune; but passing from change to change all things return more or less to their former state."