o be none other than the
gods whom the universe worshipped, and who in earlier days had
announced themselves divinities, the better to rule the hearts and
minds of man.

With other guides Tiberius journeyed through lands where dreams come
true. Aristeas of Proconnesus led him among the Arimaspi, a curious
people who passed their lives fighting for gold with griffons in the
dark. With Isogonus he descended the valley of Ismaus, where wild men
were, whose feet turned inwards. In Albania he found a race with pink
eyes and white hair; in Sarmatia another that ate only on alternate
days. Agatharcides took him to Libya, and there introduced him to the
Psyllians, in whose bodies was a poison deadly to serpents, and who, to
test the fidelity of their wives, placed their children in the presence
of snakes; if the snakes fled they knew their wives were pure. Callias
took him further yet, to the home of the hermaphrodites; Nymphodorus
showed him a race of fascinators who used enchanted words. With
Apollonides he encountered women who killed with their eyes those on
whom they looked too long. Megasthenes guided him to the Astomians,
whose garments were the down of feathers, and who lived on the scent of
the rose.

In his cups they all passed, confusedly, before him; the hermaphrodites
whispered to the rose-breathers the secrets of impossible love; the
griffons bore to him women with magical eyes; the Albanians danced with
elastic feet; he heard the shrill call of the Psyllians, luring the
serpents to death; the column of Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the
Hyperboreans the reason of their fear of life, and on the wings of the
chimera he set out again in search of that continent which haunted
antiquity and which lay beyond the sea.

IV

THE PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

"Another Phaethon for the universe," Tiberius is reported to have
muttered, as he gazed at his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, who was
to suffocate him with a mattress and rule in his stead.

To rule is hardly the expression. There is no term in English to convey
that dominion over sea and sky which a Caesar possessed, and which
Caligula was the earliest to understand. Augustus was the first
magistrate of Rome, Tiberius the first citizen. Caligula was the first
emperor, but an emperor hallucinated by the enigma of his own grandeur,
a prince for whose sovereignty the world was too small.

Each epoch has its secret, sometimes puerile, often perplexing;