ikely. That would be, at the very least, as far
back as nine or ten thousand B.C.; which is contemptibly modern,
when you think of the hundred and sixty thousand years of our
present sub-race. The thing that is in the back of my mind is,
that Rome is probably as old as that sub-race, or nearly so; but
wild horses should not drag from me a statement of it. Rome,
London, Paris,--all and any of them, for that matter.--But a
hundred and sixty thousand or ten thousand, no man's name could
survive so long, I think, as a peg on which to hang actual
history. It would pass, long before the ten millenniums were
over, into legend; and become that of a God or demigod,--whose
cult, also, would need reviving, in time, by some new avatar.
Now (as remarked before) humanity has a profound instinct for
avatars; and also (as you would expect) for Reincarnation. The
sixth-century Britons were reminded by one of their chieftains of
some mighty king or God of prehistory; the two got mixed, and
the mixture came down as the Arthur of the legend. This is what
I mean by 'reviving the cult.' Now then, who was Romulus?--Some
near or remote descendant of heroic refugees from fallen Troy,
who rebuilt Rome or reestablished its sovereignty?--Very likely,
again;--I mean, very likely both that and the king's son from
Ruta or Daitya. And lastly, very likely some tough little
peasant-bandit restorer, not so long before the Etruscan
conquest, whom the people came to mix up witl mightier figures
half forgotten. . . . .

We see his history, as the Romans did, through the lens of a
tough little peasant-bandit city; through the lens of a pralaya,
which makes pralayic all objects seen. It is like the Irish
peasant-girl who has seen the palace of the king of the fairies;
she describes you something akin to the greatest magnificence she
knows,--which happens to be the house of the local _squireen._
Now the Etruscan domination, as we have noted, could probably
not have begun before 1000 B.C.; at which time, to go by our
hypothesis as to the length and recurrence of the cycles, Europe
was in dead pralaya, and had been since 1480. So that, possibly,
you would have had between 1480 and 1000 a Rome in pralaya, but
independent--like Andorra now, or Montenegro. The stories we get
about the seven kings would fit such a time admirably. They tell
of pralayic provincials; and Rome, during that second half of
the second millennium B.C., would have been just