lto
Sed periit ponto, totam et dolor obruit urbem.
Praximenes autem patriis huc venit ab oris
Cum populo et fratris monumentum hoc struxit adempti."

Two thousand five hundred years ago! That is far back. But it is not the
oldest date "in the world." Americans are accused of cherishing an
inordinate love for the superlative--the longest river, the highest
mountain, the deepest mine in the world, the largest diamond in the
world; there must always be that tag "in the world" to interest us. When
ancient objects are in question we are said to rush from one to the
next, applying our sole test; and we drop at any time a tomb or a
temple, no matter how beautiful, if there comes a rumor that another has
been discovered a little farther on which is thought to be a trifle more
venerable. Thus they chaff us--pilgrims from a land where Nature herself
works in superlatives, and where there is no antiquity at all. In Italy
our mania, exercising itself upon smaller objects than temples, brings
us nearer the comprehension (or non-comprehension) of the contemptuous
natives. "What hideous" (she called it hee-dee us) "things you _do_
buy!" I heard an Italian lady exclaim with conviction some years ago, as
she happened to meet three of her American acquaintances returning from
a hunt through the antiquity-shops of Naples, loaded with a battered
lamp, a square of moth-eaten tapestry with an indecipherable
inscription, and a nondescript broken animal in bronze, without head,
tail, or legs, who might have been intended for a dragon, or possibly
for a cow. After a while we pass this stage of antiquity-shops. But we
never pass the Etruscans, or, rather, I should speak for myself, and say
that I never passed them; I was perpetually haunted by them. There was
one road in particular, a lonely track which led from Bellosguardo (at
Florence) up a steep hill, and I was forever climbing this stony ascent
because, forsooth, it was set down on an Italian map as "the old
Etruscan way between Fiesole and Volterra," two strongholds of this
mysterious people. I was sure that there were tombs with strangely
painted walls close at hand, and when there was no one in sight I made
furtive archaeological pokes with my parasol. In Italy an Etruscan tomb
seems the oldest thing "in the world." And at Corfu the unearthed Greek
cemetery became doubly interesting when I learned that among the relics
discovered there was a lioness couchant, concerning wh