In Renaissance Italy, as in ancient Greece, a very high level of civilization was combined with a very low level of morals : both ages exhibit the greatest heights of genius and the greatest depths of scoundrelism, and in both the scoundrels and the men of genius are by no means antagonistic to each other. Leonardo erected fortifications for Cesare Borgia; some of the pupils of Socrates were among the worst of the thirty tyrants; Plato's disciples were mixed up in shameful doings in Syracuse, and Aristotle married a tyrant's niece. In both ages, after art, literature, and murder had flourished side by side for about a hundred and fifty years, all were extinguished together by less civilized but more cohesive nations from the West and North. In both cases the loss of political independence involved not only cultural decay, but loss of commercial supremacy and catastrophic impoverishment.
Source: Power, a new social analysis, 1938, by Bertrand Russell
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