PROLOGUE

Reflecting in my memory on what is found in ancient histories and the recollections of our elders together, and what we have been able to see in our own days in Italy as elsewhere—how not a few families used to be most happy and glorious, which are now failed and extinguished—I used to often wonder and grieve within myself whether unjust and malignant fortune Fortune: from the Latin Fortuna, this refers to the unpredictable and often cruel force of chance or luck that Renaissance thinkers believed governed worldly affairs had such power over men. I wondered if it were permitted for her, with her volatility and recklessness, to cast down from every happiness families well-supplied with most excellent men original: "virtuosissimi." In this context, virtù refers not just to moral goodness, but to the Renaissance ideal of "manly excellence," including talent, strength, and civic capability., abundant in those precious and dear things desired by mortals, adorned with great dignity, fame, praise, authority, and grace. It seemed she could place them in poverty, solitude, and misery; and from a great number of fathers, reduce them to a very few grandsons; and from immeasurable riches to extreme necessity; and from the clearest splendor of glory, submerge them in such calamity, leaving them abject, cast into darkness and tempestuous adversity.

Ah! How many ruined and fallen families are seen today! It would be impossible to number or recount how many there are similar to the Fabii, Decii, Drusii, Gracchi, and Marcelli These were famous noble families of the Roman Republic, known for their service to the state and their eventual decline or extinction., and to those others most noble among the ancients. So too in our own land, there have been many families who existed for the public good to maintain liberty, to preserve the authority and dignity of the fatherland in peace and in war—most modest, prudent, and strong families, of the sort that were feared by their enemies and felt themselves to be loved and revered by their friends. Of all these families, not only has their magnificence and greatness diminished, but their men; and not only are the men decreased, but even the very name, the memory of them, and almost every record is found to be erased and nullified.

Wherefore, not without cause, it has always seemed to me that I should want to know if fortune can ever have such power over human affairs, and if she is granted this excessive license to bring to ruin, with her instability and inconstancy, the greatest...

fortune, virtue, nobility, histories, Italy, family, Fabii, Decii, Drusii, Gracchi, Marcelli, Leon Battista Alberti