Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/116

 del Riccio, Antonio Petreo and Donato Giannotti, and which the last named reproduced in his "Dialogues on the Diane Comedy." The friends expressed astonishment that Dante should have placed Brutus and Cassius in the last degree of Hell and Cæsar above. Michael Angelo questioned on the point, spoke in favour of tyrannicide: "If you had attentively read the first cantos," he said, "you would have seen that Dante knew the nature of tyrants only too well, and what punishments they deserved to receive from God and man. He places them among those who have been 'violent against their neighbour,' and punishes them in the seventh circle by plunging them into boiling blood . . . Since Dante recognised that, it is impossible to admit that he did not recognise that Cæsar was the tyrant of his country and that Brutus and Cassius did right to massacre him. For he who kills a tyrant, kills not a man but a beast with human face. All tyrants are devoid of the love which every one ought to naturally feel for his neighbour. They are deprived of human inclinations; they are no longer, therefore, men but brutes. That they possess no love for their neighbour is evident, otherwise they would not have taken what belonged to others, and would not have become tyrants by trampling others