he adopted a Latin one to his liking, thus from necessity setting a fashion his imitators followed from affectation. When approached in the days of his fame by the Sanseverini with proposals to recognise him as a kinsman, he answered with a proud and laconic refusal.[5] The Academy, formed of super-men infected with pagan ideals, contemptuous of scholastic learning and impatient of the restraints of Christian morality, did not long escape the suspicions of the orthodox; suspicions only too well warranted and inevitably productive of antagonism ending in condemnation.[6] [Note 5: His refusal was in the following curt form: _Pomponius Lætus cognatis et propinquis suis, salutem. Quod petitis fieri non potest.--Valete_. Consult Tiraboschi, _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_, vol. vii., cap. v.; Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom in Mittelalter_; Burkhardt, _Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien_, and Voigt in his _Wiederlebung des Klassischen Alterthums_.] [Note 6: Sabellicus, in a letter to Antonio Morosini (_Liber Epistolarum_, xi., p. 459) wrote thus of Pomponius Lætus: ..._fuit ab initio contemptor religionis, sed ingravesciente ætate coepit res ipsa, ut mibi dicitur curæ esse. In Crispo et Livio reposint quædam; et si nemo religiosius timidiusques tractavit veterum scripta ... Græca ... vix attingit_. While to a restricted number, humanism stood for intellectual emancipation, to the many it meant the rejection of the moral restraints on conduct imposed by the law of the Church, and a revival of the vices that flourished in the decadent epochs of Greece and Rome.] From trifles, as they may seem to us at this distance of time, hostile ingenuity wove the web destined to enmesh the incautious Academicians. The adoption of fanciful Latin appellations--in itself a sufficiently innocent conceit--was construed into a demonstration of revolt against established Christian usage, almost savouring of contempt for the canonised saints of the Church. Pomponius Lætus was nameless, and hence free to adopt whatever name he chose; his associates and admiring disciples paid him the homage of imitation, proud to associate themselves, by means of this pedantic fancy, with him they called master. The Florentine, Buonacorsi, took the name of Callimachus Experiens; the Roman, Marco, masqueraded as Asclepiades; two Venetian brothers gladly exchanged honest, vulgar Piscina for the signature of Marsus, while another, Marino, adopted that of Glaucus. If the neo-pagans were harmless and playful merely, their opponents were dangerously in earnest. In 1468 a grave charge of conspiracy against the Pope's life and of organising a schism led to the arrest of Pomponius and Platina, some of the more wary members of the compromised fraternity saving themselves by timely flight.