have been “singular to see these men—generally of low 
     origin and devoid of culture—surrounded in their camps 
     by ambassadors, poets and learned men, who read to 
     them Livy and Cicero, and original verses, in which they 
     were compared to Scipio and Hannibal, to Caesar and 
     Alexander.” But they were all acting on a tiny scale the 
     past that was being unearthed, just as English statesmen 
     were modelling themselves at the time of England’s great 
     expansion on the statesmen of Roman antiquity. With the 
     more intelligent of them, like Cesare Borgia, this 
     archaeological and analogic habit of mind assumed the 
     proportion of a mania. His “Aut Caesar aut nihil” is the 
     same type of literature as is concentrated in the small 
     maniacal figure of Julien Sorel, Stendhal’s little domestic 
     Napoleon. Borgia’s motto itself is reminiscent of the title 
     of a book popular before the war in Germany: Wordly