Cola's great idea was destined to wait five hundred years for fulfilment. The time was not ripe, and he himself not a suitable instrument. His career was brief. He became not only vainglorious but also very cruel. He grew fat, and lost the charm of youth and novelty. The nobles and the upper classes of Rome hated him; and when, in need of money, he increased the taxes, the Roman populace turned upon him, stormed the Capitol, captured him as he tried to slink away in disguise, and murdered him on the steps leading down from the palace. His head was cut off, his body was dragged through the streets and burned, and the ashes scattered to the winds. The mad dream had been, in its nature, evanescent. The classical heritage was too purely intellectual, too remote from existing needs, to be able to shape politics. But that fourteen hundred years after the death of Julius Caesar, Cola should have been able to establish himself as Roman tribune on the Capitoline Hill, and to act as if the Republic of the days of the Gracchi had been but temporarily superseded, shows the immense influence of Rome over the mediaeval imagination, and helps us to understand the autocratic power of the classical heritage in shaping and directing the intellectual revolution in Italy. FOOTNOTES: [15] _Rome in the Middle Ages_, Gregorovius, vol. vi, p. 295, note 1 (translated). CHAPTER XXII THE ILLS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY The fourteenth century undoubtedly felt itself emancipated from the limitations of the Middle Ages, and with justice, so far as the classical revival was concerned, but it did little or nothing to free itself from ills that were distinctly of a mediaeval character,--plague, lawlessness, and tyranny. In that respect, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World was slow and made a striking contrast with the rapid evolution of art.