hast thou never received other intelligence of the God
whose company thou didst so deliberately refuse?"

"Never that I remember."

"Hast thou not told me that I am not the first who descended alive into
these abodes and presented himself before thee?"

"Thou dost remind me of it. A century and a half ago, or so it seems
to me (it is difficult to reckon days and years amid the shades),
my profound peace was intruded upon by a strange visitor. As I was
wandering beneath the gloomy foliage that borders the Styx, I saw
rising before me a human form more opaque and darker than that of the
inhabitants of these shores. I recognised a living person. He was
of high stature, thin, with an aquiline nose, sharp chin, and hollow
cheeks. His dark eyes shot forth fire; a red hood girt with a crown of
laurels bound his lean brows. His bones pierced through the tight
brown cloak that descended to his heels. He saluted me with deference,
tempered by a sort of fierce pride, and addressed me in a speech more
obscure and incorrect than that of those Gauls with whom the divine
Julius filled both his legions and the Curia. At last I understood that
he had been born near Fiesole, in an ancient Etruscan colony that Sulla
had founded on the banks of the Arno, and which had prospered; that
he had obtained municipal honours, but that he had thrown himself
vehemently into the sanguinary quarrels which arose between the senate,
the knights, and the people, that he had been defeated and banished, and
now he wandered in exile throughout the world. He described Italy to me
as distracted by more wars and discords than in the time of my youth,
and as sighing anew for a second Augustus. I pitied his misfortune,
remembering what I myself had formerly endured.

"An audacious spirit unceasingly disquieted him, and his mind harboured
great thoughts, but alas! his rudeness and ignorance displayed the
triumph of barbarism. He knew neither poetry, nor science, nor even
the tongue of the Greeks, and he was ignorant, too, of the ancient
traditions concerning the origin of the world and the nature of the
gods. He bravely repeated fables which in my time would have brought
smiles to the little children who were not yet old enough to pay for
admission at the baths. The vulgar easily believe in monsters. The
Etruscans especially peopled hell with demons, hideous as a sick man's
dreams. That they have not abandoned their childish imaginings after
so many centur