Sad times, however, were in store for Rome. When Leo's successor read the Latin letters of the Apostolic secretaries, he cried, '_Sunt litteræ unius poetæ_;' and after walking through the Belvedere Gallery, he gave vent to his feelings in the famous exclamation, '_Sunt idola antiquorum_.' The humanists had nothing to expect from such a master. The election of Giulio de' Medici restored the hope that Rome might once more be as it had been beneath the sway of Leo. Yet for Clement VII. was reserved the final bitterness of utter ruin. In the fourth year of his papacy happened the catastrophe that closed one period of Italian history, and opened a new era for Rome and for the nation. The tale of the sack has been already told.[409] A fitting conclusion for this chapter may be found in Valeriano's discourse upon its consequences to the literary society assembled by the Medici at the Papal Court. [Footnote 409: Vol. I., _Age of Despots_, App. V.] Valeriano's dialogue 'De Literatorum Infelicitate' opens with a description of Rome in the pontificate of Leo.[410] Never since the downfall of the Empire, he says, had letters flourished so freely or had men of learning found more generous patronage. Of that brilliant company Valeriano was himself an ornament. The friend of Egidius and the favourite of Leo, he spent his time in the composition of Latin poems, panegyrical and satiric, and in the exploration of antiquities. Afterwards he became the protonotary of Clement, and supervised the education of the Medicean bastards Alessandro and Ippolito. His good fortune carried him to Piacenza in the fatal year of 1527. On his return to Rome after the siege, he looked in vain for his old comrades and associates. 'Good God!' he exclaims in the dialogue before us, 'when first I began to inquire for the philosophers, orators, poets, and professors of Greek and Latin literature, whose names were written on my tablets, how great, how horrible a tragedy was offered to me! Of all those lettered men whom I had hoped to see, how many had perished miserably, carried off by the most cruel of all fates, overwhelmed by undeserved calamities: some dead of plague, some brought to a slow end by penury in exile, others slaughtered by a foeman's sword, others worn out by daily tortures; some, again, and these of all the most unhappy, driven by anguish to self-murder.' John Goritz, captured by his countrymen, had ransomed himself with the sacrifice of all his wealth, and now was dying of despair at Verona. Colocci had seen his house, with its museums and MSS., burned before his eyes. Angelo Cesi, maltreated by the Spanish soldiers on a sick bed, died of his injuries before the year was out. Marone, the brilliant improvisatore, stripped of everything and deprived of his poems, the accumulated compositions of years spent in Leo's service, breathed his last in a miserable tavern. Marco Fabio Calvi, Raphael's friend and teacher, succumbed to sickness in a hospital.