A large portion of Valla's biography is absorbed by the history of his quarrels with Poggio, Georgios Trapezuntios, and other men of mark. Enough has already been said about these literary feuds; nor need I allude to them again, except for the purpose of bringing a third Court-scholar of Alfonso's into notice. Bartolommeo Fazio, a native of La Spezzia, occupied the position of historiographer at Naples. In addition to his annals of the life of Alfonso, he compiled a book on celebrated men, and won the reputation of being the neatest Latinist in prose of his age. Fazio ventured to criticise the style of Valla, in whose works he professed to have detected five hundred faults of language. Eight books of invectives and recriminations were exchanged between them; and when both died in 1457, this epigram was composed in celebration of their animosity:-- Ne vel in Elysiis sine vindice Valla susurret, Facius haud multos post obit ipse dies. The amusement afforded to Roman emperors by fights in the arena, and to feudal nobles by the squabbles of their fools, seems to have been extracted by Italian patrons from the duels of well-matched humanists. What personal jealousies, what anxious competition for the princely favour, such warfare concealed may be readily imagined; nor is it improbable that Fazio's attack on Valli was prompted by the covert spite of Beccadelli. Scarcely less close to the person of Alfonso than the students with whom we have been occupied, stood Giannantonio Porcello, a native of Naples. He was distinguished by his command of versification: the fluency with which he poured fourth Latin elegiacs and hexameters approached that of an improvisatore of the Molo. Alfonso sent him to the camp of the Venetians during the war waged by their general Piccinino in 1452-3 with Sforza. Porcello, who shared the tent of Piccinino on this occasion, wrote a Latin history of the campaign in the style of Livy, with moral reflections, speeches, and all the apparatus of Roman rhetoric. Piccinino figured as Scipio Æmilianus; Sforza as Hannibal. The work was dedicated to Alfonso.[251] [Footnote 251: It is printed in Muratori, vol. xx.] With the exception of Lorenzo Valla,[252] the scholars of the Court of Naples were stylists and poets rather than men of erudition. Freedom both of speculation and of morals marked society in Southern Italy, where the protection of a powerful monarch at war with the Church, and the license of a luxurious capital, released the humanists from such slight restraints as public opinion and conventional decorum placed on them in Rome and Florence. [Footnote 252: The protection extended to Manetti and to Filelfo ought, however, to be here mentioned. Nearly all the contemporary scholars of Italy dedicated works to Alfonso.]