From a theoretical point of view, when the appeal was made to antiquity, the conception of nobility could be both justified and condemned from Aristotle alone. Dante, for example, derives from Aristotle's definition, 'Nobility rests on excellence and inherited wealth,' his own saying, 'Nobility rests on personal excellence or on that of forefathers.' But elsewhere he is not satisfied with this conclusion. He blames himself, because even in Paradise, while talking with his ancestor Cacciaguida, he made mention of his noble origin, which is but a mantle from which time is ever cutting something away, unless we ourselves add daily fresh worth to it. And in the 'Convito' he disconnects 'nobile' and 'nobilita' from every condition of birth, and identifies the idea with the capacity for moral and intellectual eminence, laying a special stress on high culture by calling 'nobilita' the sister of 'filosofia.'
And as time went on, the greater the influence of humanism on the Italian mind, the firmer and more widespread became the conviction that birth decides nothing as to the goodness or badness of a man. In the fifteenth century this was the prevailing opinion. Poggio, in his dialogue 'On nobility,' agrees with his interlocutors - Niccolo Niccoli, and Lorenzo Medici, brother of the great Cosimo - that there is no other nobility than that of personal merit. The keenest shafts of his ridicule are directed against much of what vulgar prejudice thinks indispensable to an aristocratic life. 'A man is the farther removed from true nobility, the longer his forefathers have plied the trade of brigands. The taste for hawking and hunting saviours no more of nobility than the nests and lairs of the hunted creatures of spikenard. The cultivation of the soil, as practiced by the ancients, would be much nobler than this senseless wandering through the hills and woods, by which men make themselves like to the brutes than to the reasonable creatures. It may serve well enough as a recreation, but not as the business of a lifetime.'
