was the suspicion wholly destitute of color.  The conspiracy of Porcari against Nicholas, and the Catilinarian riots of Tiburzio which had troubled the pontificate of Pius, were still fresh in people’s memories; nor was the position of the Pope in Rome as yet by any means secure.  What increased Paul’s anxiety was the fact that some scholars, appointed secretaries of the briefs (Abbreviatori) by Pius and deprived of office by himself, were members of the Platonic Society.  Their animosity against him was both natural and ill-concealed.  At the same time the bitter hatred avowed by Laurentius Valla against the temporal power might in an age of conjurations have meant active malice.  Leo Alberti hints that Porcari had been supported by strong backers outside Rome; and one of the accusations against the Platonists was that Pomponius Laetus had addressed Platina as Holy Father.  Now both Pomponius Laetus and Valla had influence in Naples, while Paul was on the verge of open rupture with King Ferdinand.  He therefore had sufficient grounds for suspecting a Neapolitan intrigue, in which the humanists were playing the parts of Brutus and Cassius.  Yet though we take this trouble to construct some show of reason for the panic of the Pope, the fact remains that he was really mistaken at the outset; and of the stupidity, cruelty, and injustice of his subsequent conduct there can be no doubt.  He seized the chief members of the Roman Academy, imprisoned them, put them to the torture, and killed some of them upon the rack.  ’You would have taken Castle S. Angelo for Phalaris’ bull,’ writes Platina; ’the hollow vaults did so resound with the cries of innocent young men.’  No evidence of a conspiracy could be extorted.  Then Paul tried the survivors for unorthodoxy.  They proved the soundness of their faith to the satisfaction of the Pope’s inquisitors.  Nothing remained but to release them, or to shut them up in dungeons, in order that the people might not say the Holy Father had arrested them without due cause.  The latter course was chosen.  Platina, the historian of the Popes, was one of the abbreviatori whom Paul had cashiered, and one of the Platonists whom he had tortured.  The tale of Papal persecution loses, therefore, nothing in the telling; for if the humanists of the fifteenth century were powerful in anything it was in writing innuendoes and invectives.  Among other anecdotes, he relates how, while he was being dislocated on the rack, the inquisitors Vianesi and Sanga held a sprightly colloquy about a ring which the one said jestingly the other had received as a love-token from a girl.  The whole situation is characteristic of Papal Rome in the Renaissance.