When he was put to death, he devoted his soul to Satan with fearful
words; here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the harvest;
here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in the
church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone--'so
gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people,' adds the great
scholar. The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the next day
dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city thrown into
the Arno.
These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have
occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth century. But
now comes the literary influence of antiquity. We know positively that
the humanists were peculiarly accessible to prodigies and auguries, and
instances of this have been already quoted. If further evidence were
needed, it would be found in Poggio. The same radical thinker who
denied the rights of noble birth and the inequality of men, not only
believed in all the mediaeval stories of ghosts and devils, but also in
prodigies after the ancient pattern, like those said to have occurred
on the last visit of Pope Eugenius IV to Florence. 'Near Como there
were seen one evening four thousand dogs, who took the road to Germany;
these were followed by a great herd of cattle, and these by an army on
foot and horseback, some with no heads and some with almost invisible
heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another herd of cattle behind
him.
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