Meanwhile people wondered who could take up the weight of such a great burden and succeed such a king. Rumor, the true herald of fame, designated Numa for the throne. It wasn't enough for him to know just the rites of the Sabine people—in his capacious mind he conceived greater things and asked what the nature of the universe was. This love of learning made him leave his homeland and Cures and travel to the city of his Herculean host.

When he asked which Greek had founded these walls on Italian shores, one of the elders who knew the ancient age told him this story:

"Rich with Spanish cattle, born from Jupiter, Hercules is said to have reached the fortunate Lacinian coast from the Ocean. While his herd wandered over the tender grass, he himself entered the great house—the not inhospitable dwelling—of Croton, and there he rested his body from his long labor. As he was leaving he said: 'In the time of your descendants, this place will be a city,' and his promises came true.

"For there was a man named Myscelus, son of Alemon from Argos, the most acceptable to the gods of his time. The club-bearer leaned over him, heavy with sleep, and spoke to him: 'Come on, leave your ancestral home! Go, seek the stony waters of distant Aesarus!' He threatened many terrible things if Myscelus didn't obey. Then the god and sleep departed together.

"The son of Alemon rose and silently turned over in his mind what he'd recently seen. For a long time his decision battled with itself: divine will ordered him to go, but the laws forbade departure, and death was the penalty for wanting to change one's homeland.

"The bright Sun had hidden his shining head in the Ocean, and the very dense Night had raised her starry face. The same god seemed to appear again and warn him of the same things, threatening more and heavier punishments if he didn't obey. He was terrified and prepared to move his ancestral household gods to a new home. But murmuring arose in the city, and he was put on trial for scorning the laws. When the earlier case was completed and the crime was proven without a witness, the squalid defendant raised his face and hands to the gods and said: 'O you who earned the right to heaven with twelve labors, bring help, I pray! For you're the cause of my crime.'

"There was an ancient custom of condemning the guilty with black pebbles and acquitting them with white ones. This harsh sentence was passed in the same way, and every black stone was dropped into the pitiless urn. But when the urn was turned over and poured out the pebbles to be counted, the color of all of them had changed from black to white, and the verdict, made bright by Hercules's divine power, freed the son of Alemon. He gave thanks to his father Amphitryon's son, and with favorable winds he sailed across the Ionian Sea, passed Sallentine Neretum, Spartan Tarentum, the bays of Sybaris and Siris, Crimisa and the fields of Iapyx, and having scarcely journeyed around the lands that face the seas, he found the fated mouth of the Aesarus River.

"Not far from here was a mound under which the sacred bones of Croton covered the earth. He built the ordered walls there in that land and took the city's name from the buried man."

This, according to reliable tradition, was the origin of the place and the city founded on Italian shores.

There was a man here born in Samos, but he'd fled both Samos and its rulers at the same time, and he was voluntarily an exile because he hated tyranny. Though the gods were remote in their region of the sky, he approached them with his mind, and those things that nature denied to human sight, he drank in with the eyes of his spirit. When he'd examined all things with his mind and wakeful care, he offered them to the public to be learned. To silent crowds who marveled at his words, he taught about the origins of the great universe and the causes of things—what nature is, what god is, where snow comes from, what the origin of lightning is, whether Jupiter thunders or the winds when they break the cloud, what shakes the earth, by what law the stars move, and whatever else lies hidden.

He was also the first to argue against placing animals on our tables, and the first to open his learned mouth—though it wasn't believed—with words like these:

"Stop, mortals, defiling your bodies with wicked feasts! There are grains, there are fruits weighing down the branches with their own weight, and swelling grapes on the vines. There are sweet herbs, and there are some that can be softened and made tender by flame. The flowing milk isn't taken from you, nor honey fragrant with thyme's flower. The earth, lavish in its wealth, offers gentle foods and provides feasts without slaughter and blood.

"Beasts satisfy their hunger with meat, but not all of them—horses and sheep and cattle live on grass. But those with fierce and savage natures—Armenian tigers and raging lions and bears and wolves—delight in bloody banquets. How great a crime it is to bury guts in guts, to fatten a greedy body by cramming in another body, for one living thing to live by the death of another living thing! Is it possible that in the midst of such abundance that the earth, best of mothers, produces, nothing pleases you but to chew on sad wounds with cruel teeth and bring back the ways of the Cyclopes, and you can't appease the cravings of your ill-mannered, greedy belly unless you destroy another life?

"But that ancient age, which we called golden, was blessed with the fruit of trees and the herbs that the earth produces, and didn't pollute mouths with blood. Then birds moved their wings safely through the air, and the rabbit wandered fearlessly through the middle of the fields, and no fish's own gullibility hung it on a hook. Everything was without traps and feared no treachery and was full of peace.

"But after some worthless instigator—whoever he was—envied the lions their diet and plunged flesh food into his greedy belly, he paved the way for crime. First the iron sword could have grown warm and stained with the slaughter of wild beasts—and that would have been enough! We confess that creatures seeking our death can be killed without impiety. But as much as they deserved killing, they didn't deserve eating.

"From there the evil went further. The pig is thought to have been the first victim to deserve death, because it rooted up seeds with its broad snout and cut short the year's hope. The goat too, for biting the vine, is led to the altars of avenging Bacchus to be sacrificed. Their own guilt harmed these two!

"But what have you done, sheep—peaceful flock, born to protect humans—you who carry nectar in your full udders, who give us soft clothing from your wool, who help us more by your life than by your death? What have oxen deserved—animals without fraud or deceit, harmless, simple, born to endure labor? Utterly ungrateful and undeserving of the gift of grain is the man who could slaughter his own farm worker right after removing the weight of the curved plow, who struck with an axe those necks worn out by labor—necks that had so often renewed the hard field, that had given so many harvests!

"It's not enough that such an evil is committed—they've even involved the gods in their crime! They believe the divine power rejoices in the slaughter of the laboring bull! A victim without blemish and most beautiful in form—for beauty harms it—distinguished with ribbons and gold, stands before the altars. Ignorant, it hears the prayer and sees placed between the horns on its forehead the very grain it cultivated, and struck, it stains the knives with blood—knives it perhaps saw earlier in clear water.

"Immediately they rip the guts from its living chest and examine them, searching for the will of the gods in them. Then—so great is humanity's hunger for forbidden foods—you dare to eat them, mortal race! I beg you, don't do this! Pay attention to my warnings! When you give the limbs of slaughtered cattle to your mouths, know and understand that you're chewing your own farmers.

"And since a god moves my mouth, I'll follow the god who moves my mouth properly. I'll reveal my Delphi and the very heavens themselves, and I'll open the oracles of my august mind. I'll sing of great things not investigated by the minds of earlier thinkers, things that have long lain hidden. It's a joy to travel through the lofty stars, a joy to leave the earth and its sluggish home behind, to ride on clouds and stand on the shoulders of mighty Atlas, to look down from afar at people wandering everywhere and lacking reason, trembling and fearing death, and to encourage them like this and unroll the sequence of fate:

"'O race stunned by the terror of cold death, why do you fear the Styx, why darkness and empty names—the stuff of poets, the terrors of an unreal world? Whether flame or time's decay takes your bodies, you can be sure they can suffer no evil. Souls lack death and always, when they've left their former home, live in new dwellings, are received and dwell there. I myself—for I remember—was Euphorbus, son of Panthus, at the time of the Trojan war, in whose chest once stuck the heavy spear of the younger son of Atreus. Recently I recognized the shield, the burden of my left arm, in the temple of Juno at Argos!

"'All things change, nothing dies. The spirit wanders and comes here from there, goes there from here, and occupies whatever bodies it likes. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from us into beasts, and it never perishes in any time. And just as soft wax is easily stamped with new shapes and doesn't remain as it was and doesn't keep the same form, but is still itself the same wax—so I teach that the soul is always the same, but migrates into various forms.

"'Therefore, so that piety isn't conquered by the belly's desire, stop, I prophesy, driving out kindred souls with wicked slaughter, and don't let blood be nourished by blood!

"'And since I've set sail on the great ocean and given my sails to the wind: nothing in the whole world endures. Everything flows, and every image is formed as a wanderer. Time itself glides with constant motion, no different from a river. For neither can a river stand still, nor can the fleeting hour. But as wave is pushed by wave, and the one in front is pressed by the one coming and presses the one before it, so times both flee and follow in the same way, and are always new. For what was before is left behind, and what never was comes into being, and every moment is renewed.

"'You see how night, once it's run its course, stretches toward light, and this bright radiance succeeds black night. The color of the sky isn't the same when everything lies exhausted in the middle of rest as when bright Lucifer comes forth on his white horse, or again when Aurora, forerunner of the light, stains the orb she'll hand over to Phoebus. The god's own shield is red when it rises from the lowest earth in the morning, and red when it's hidden in the lowest earth, but it's brilliant white at its peak—because there the nature of the upper air is better and it escapes far from the earth's contamination. Nor can the form of nocturnal Diana ever be equal or the same—if she's growing, she's smaller today than tomorrow; if she's shrinking, she's larger.

"'What about this? Don't you see the year passing through four stages, imitating the phases of our own life? For it's tender and milky in early spring, and most like a child's age. Then the grass is fresh and lacks strength, swells but isn't solid, and delights the farmers with hope. Everything then blooms, and the nourishing field plays with flowers' colors, but there's not yet any vigor in the leaves. After spring passes, the year moves into summer and becomes a strong youth. There's no more robust age, none more fertile, none that burns hotter. Then autumn arrives, after youth's heat is laid aside—mature and mild, between youth and old age, moderate in temperament, with temples sprinkled with gray hair. Then shivering winter comes with its dreadful, trembling step, either stripped of its hair or, what hair it has, white.

"'Our own bodies too are always changing without rest, and what we were or are, we won't be tomorrow. There was that day when we were only seeds and human promise, hidden in our mother's womb. Nature applied her artisan hands and didn't want bodies to be cramped in distended guts, and she sent us from our home into the open air. Brought out into the light, the infant lay without strength. Soon it became a four-footed creature and supported its limbs in the way of beasts. Gradually, trembling and not yet firm in the knees, it stood up, the sinews aided by some effort. Then it became strong and swift, and passed through the space of youth. When it had lived through the years of middle age too, it slides down the sloping path of declining old age. Old age undermines and destroys the strength of earlier time. Old Milo weeps when he looks at those sagging arms that used to be solid with the mass of muscles, similar to Hercules's, now hanging flabby. Tyndareus's daughter also weeps when she sees old-age wrinkles in a mirror, and asks herself why she was twice abducted.

"'Time, devourer of things, and you, envious old age—you destroy everything! Gnawed by the teeth of time, you consume all things gradually with slow death!

"'Even these things that we call elements don't endure. Pay attention and I'll teach you what changes they go through. The eternal universe contains four generative bodies. Of these, two are heavy and by their own weight are carried downward—earth and water. And just as many lack weight and, with nothing pressing them down, seek the heights—air and fire, which is purer than air. Though they're separated in space, still everything comes from them and returns into them. Earth, dissolved, thins into flowing water. Water, attenuated, goes off into winds and air. Air in turn, with its weight removed, flashes up as the finest fire into the upper regions. Then they return backward, and the same order is unwoven. For fire, condensing, passes into thick air; this into water; water, compressed, gathers into earth.

"'No form remains the same for anything, and nature, the renewer of things, repairs forms from others into others. Nothing in the whole world, believe me, dies, but it varies and renews its face. What's called being born is beginning to be something different from what it was before, and dying is ceasing to be that same thing. Though perhaps those things are transferred here, and these transferred there, still the total sum remains constant.

"'I wouldn't believe that anything endures long under the same appearance. That's how you've come from the golden age to the iron, you generations—that's how often the fortune of places has been reversed. I myself have seen what was once the most solid land become a strait. I've seen lands made from the sea. Seashells have lain far from the ocean, and an old anchor has been found on mountain peaks. What was a plain, a downrush of water has made into a valley, and by flooding, a mountain has been brought down to the level sea. Where there was marshy land, dry earth now bakes with arid sands, and what endured thirst now stands soaked with swamps.

"'Here nature has opened new springs, there she's closed them. Rivers either burst forth when the earth is shaken by deep tremors, or they shrink and dry up. So when the Lycus is drunk up by a terrestrial chasm, it emerges far from there and is reborn from another mouth. So the mighty Erasinus is sometimes swallowed up, sometimes flows with hidden stream and is returned to the Argolic fields. The Mysus too is said to have regretted its source and former banks, and now the Caicus flows in a different course. In Sicily the Amenanus now rolls along sandy waters, now flows dry with its springs suppressed. Before, it could be drunk, but now the Anigrus pours out waters you wouldn't want to touch—not unless we should take all credibility from the poets!—after the two-formed centaurs washed there the wounds that the club-bearer's bow had made.

"'What about this? Hasn't the Hypanis, which rises from the Scythian mountains and was sweet, been spoiled by bitter salts?

"'Antissa, Pharos, and Phoenician Tyre were surrounded by waves—now none of them is an island. The ancient colonists had Leucas as a continuous landmass—now the straits flow around it. Zancle too is said to have been joined to Italy, until the sea stole the border and pushed the land back with its intervening wave. If you look for the Achaean cities of Helice and Buris, you'll find them under the waters, and sailors still point out the submerged towns with their sloping walls.

"'Near Pittheus's Troezen there's a mound, steep and without any trees—once the flattest area of a plain, but now a mound. For—the thing is horrible to tell!—the fierce force of winds, enclosed in dark caverns and struggling in vain, desiring to breathe out somewhere and enjoy freer sky, when there was no crack in the whole prison and no passage open to the blasts, swelled up the stretched earth, just as breath from the mouth usually swells a bladder or the hide stripped from a two-horned goat. That swelling of the place remained and has the appearance of a high hill and has hardened with long age.

"'Though many things that I've heard and learned come to mind, I'll mention just a few more. What about this? Doesn't water too give and take new forms? Your wave, horned Ammon, is cold at midday, but it grows warm at sunrise and sunset. The Athamanes are said to set wood on fire when water is brought near, when the moon has shrunk to its smallest orbs. The Ciconians have a river that, when drunk, turns the guts to stone and encrusts things it touches with marble. The Crathis and the Sybaris, bordering our shores, make hair like amber and gold. And what's more wondrous—there are liquids that can change not just bodies but even minds. Who hasn't heard of the obscene water of Salmacis and the Ethiopian lakes? Whoever drinks from them with their lips either goes mad or suffers a marvelous heavy sleep. Whoever has relieved thirst from the Clitorian spring flees wine and rejoices in pure water while abstaining—either there's a power in the water opposed to warming wine, or, as the natives tell it, the son of Amythaon, after he snatched Proetus's daughters from their furies through song and herbs, threw the purgings of their minds into those waters, and the hatred of wine has remained in the stream. A river with a different effect, the Lyncestian, flows from this. Whoever has drunk from it with too immoderate a throat stumbles along no differently than if he'd drunk pure wine.

"'There's a place in Arcadia that the ancients called Pheneos, suspected for its ambiguous waters—fear them at night. At night they harm when drunk; without harm they're drunk in daylight. So lakes and rivers acquire first one power, then another. There was a time when Ortygia floated on the waves—now it sits still. The Argo feared the Symplegades, which used to clash together with the meeting of scattered waves—now they stand immobile and resist the winds. Etna, which burns with sulfurous furnaces, won't always be fiery, nor has it always been fiery. For whether the earth is an animal and lives and has many breathing places exhaling flame, it can change the paths of breathing whenever it moves, and can close these caverns and open those. Or if light winds are locked in the lowest caves and hurl rocks against rocks and material containing seeds of flame, that material catches fire from the blows—but the caves will be left cold when the winds calm. Or if bituminous forces kindle fires, or yellow sulfur burns with thin fumes—surely when the earth no longer provides food and rich nourishment for the flame, when its strength has been consumed through long time, and the greedy nature's nutriment fails, it won't bear the hunger, and fire, deserted, will desert.

"'There's a story that men in Hyperborean Pallene are accustomed to cover their bodies with light feathers when they've dipped nine times in the Tritonian marsh. I certainly don't believe it. The Scythian women too are said to practice the same arts with their limbs sprinkled with poisons.

"'But if any trust should be added to proven things—don't you see how bodies that have rotted with lingering time or fluid heat turn into small living creatures? Bury slaughtered bulls in a trench—it's a fact known from experience—from the putrid guts everywhere flower-gathering bees are born, and like their parents they cultivate the fields, favor work, and labor with hope. When a war horse is pressed into the ground, it gives birth to hornets. If you remove the curving arms from a shore crab and bury the rest in earth, a scorpion will emerge from the buried part and threaten with its curved tail. Caterpillars that weave threads around leaves in the country—a thing farmers have observed—change their form with a funeral butterfly.

"'Mud contains seeds that generate green frogs, and it generates them without feet at first, but soon gives them legs fit for swimming, and so that they're also fit for long leaps, the hind parts exceed the measure of the front parts. And the cub that a mother bear has just delivered isn't a cub but barely living flesh—the mother shapes it into limbs by licking and brings it down to a form that she herself can assume. Don't you see how the offspring of honey-making bees, which the six-sided wax covers, are born as bodies without limbs and later take on feet and wings? Who would think it could happen unless they knew it happened—Juno's bird that carries stars in its tail, Jupiter's armor-bearer, Cytherea's doves, and every kind of bird coming from the middle of an egg?

"'There are those who believe that when the spine is closed up in a tomb and rotted, human marrow changes into a snake.

"'But all these things draw their origins from others. There's one bird that renews itself and reseeds itself—the Assyrians call it the phoenix. It doesn't live on grain or herbs, but on drops of frankincense and the juice of balsam. When it has completed five centuries of its life, immediately it builds itself a nest in the branches and on the top of a trembling palm tree with its talons and pure beak. As soon as it has laid beneath itself cassia and spikes of soft nard and broken cinnamon with tawny myrrh, it settles itself on top and ends its life among the perfumes. Then they say from the father's body a small phoenix is reborn, destined to live just as many years. When age has given it strength and it can carry the burden, it lifts the nest's weight from the branches of the high tree. Dutiful, it carries its own cradle and its father's tomb, and having gained the city of Hyperion through the light breezes, it lays it down before the sacred doors in Hyperion's temple.

"'But if there's something of marvelous newness in these things, let's marvel that the hyena alternates roles, and what just now was a female who'd taken a male on her back is now a male. That creature too, which feeds on wind and air, immediately imitates whatever colors it's touched. Conquered India gave lynxes to vine-bearing Bacchus. From them, as they tell it, whatever the bladder releases turns to stones and hardens when it touches the air. So too coral, which was a soft plant under the waves, hardens the first moment it touches the air.

"'The day will end and Phoebus will dip his panting horses in the deep ocean before I can recount in words all the things translated into new forms. We see times changing and some nations taking on strength while others fall. So Troy was great in census and men and could give so much blood for ten years—now, humbled, it shows only ancient ruins and instead of wealth it shows the tombs of ancestors. Sparta was famous, great Mycenae flourished, and so did the citadels of Cecrops and Amphion. Sparta is worthless ground, lofty Mycenae has fallen. What are the Thebes of Oedipus but a name? What remains of Pandion's Athens but the name? Now too the story goes that Dardanian Rome is rising—Rome that, next to Appenine-born Tiber's waves, lays foundations for affairs under an immense mass. This city, then, is changing its form by growing, and someday will be the head of the immense world! So the prophets say, so the oracles of fate declare. And as far as I remember, Priam's son Helenus said to Aeneas when he was weeping and uncertain of safety, when Troy's affairs were failing: 'Son of a goddess, if you understand the prophecies of my mind well enough, Troy won't fall entirely while you're safe! Flame and sword will give you a path. You'll go and carry Pergamum away with you, until an external land more friendly than your homeland comes to Troy and you together. I even foresee a city owed to Phrygian descendants, as great as none exists, none will be, none has been seen in earlier ages. Other leaders through long centuries will make it powerful, but one born from Iulus's blood will make it mistress of the world. When the earth has used him, the heavenly homes will enjoy him, and heaven will be his destination.'

"These things Helenus sang to Aeneas who carried the household gods, I remember and recall with my mind, and I rejoice that the walls related to us are growing and that the Phrygians' victory over the Greeks has been useful.

"But so that we don't wander too far from the goal with horses that have forgotten the reins—the sky and whatever is under it changes forms, and the earth and whatever is in it does too. We too are part of the world, and since we're not just bodies but also winged souls and can go into the homes of beasts and be contained in the chests of cattle, let's allow bodies that may have held the souls of parents or brothers or people joined to us by some bond or certainly of humans to be safe and honored, and let's not fill our guts with Thyestean banquets!

"How badly he accustoms himself, how he prepares himself for impious human blood—the man who slits the throat of a calf with iron and gives unmoved ears to its bellowing, or who can slaughter a kid giving out cries similar to a child's, or feed on a bird to which he himself had given food! How much is lacking in this to make the crime complete? Where is this the preparation to go from here? Let the ox plow or owe death to old age, let the sheep provide weapons against the dreadful north wind, let well-fed she-goats give udders to be pressed by our hands! Take away nets and snares and the rope-traps and tricks! Don't deceive birds with lime-smeared rods, don't enclose frightened deer with feathered lines, don't hide hooked hooks with deceiving food! Destroy what harms, but even destroy only that—let mouths be empty of blood and take gentle food!'

Such teachings and others like these, they say, equipped Numa's heart, and he returned to his homeland. Sought out without asking, he accepted the reins of the Latin people. Happy with a nymph as wife and with the Muses as guides, he taught sacred rites and led a race accustomed to fierce war to the arts of peace. When, as an old man, he'd completed both his reign and his life, the Latin brides and people and fathers mourned the departed Numa. For his wife left the city and hid herself, concealed in the dense woods of the Arician valley, and with her groaning and complaining she interfered with the rites of Orestes's Diana.

Ah, how many times the nymphs of grove and lake warned her not to do this and spoke comforting words! How many times Theseus's hero said to her as she wept: "Stop your grief. Your fortune isn't the only one to be mourned. Look at the similar misfortunes of others—you'll bear yours more gently. I wish my examples couldn't ease your pain! But they can.

"Perhaps the story of some Hippolytus has reached your ears—how I died because of my father's belief and my wicked stepmother's deceit. You'll be amazed, and you'll scarcely believe it, but I'm that very man. Once Pasiphae's daughter tried in vain to seduce me to violate my father's bed, and what she wanted, she pretended I had wanted. She reversed the crime—whether more from fear of being accused or offense at being rejected—and without my deserving it my father drove me from the city and cursed my head with hostile prayers as I departed.

"I was heading in my chariot as an exile to Pittheus's Troezen, and I was already traveling the shores of the Corinthian sea when the sea rose up, and a massive heap of water seemed to curve into the form of a mountain and grow and give bellowing sounds and split at its highest peak. From here a horned bull was driven out through the broken waves, raised upright to the chest through the soft air, vomiting part of the sea from its nostrils and gaping mouth.

"My companions' hearts were terrified, but my mind remained fearless, absorbed in my exile. When my fierce horses turned their necks toward the strait and pricked up their ears in fear, disturbed by the monster's terror, they rushed the chariot headlong down the high cliffs. I struggled to pull back the foaming reins, my hands smeared with white foam, and bent backward I strained on the pliant reins. But not even this force would have overcome the horses' rage if the wheel, as it turned its continuous axle, hadn't been broken and shattered by the impact of a stump.

"I was thrown from the chariot. My limbs were held by the reins, and you could have seen my living guts dragged, my sinews caught on the stump, my limbs partly ripped away and partly held fast, my bones giving out a heavy sound when they broke, and my exhausted soul being breathed out—and there were no parts in my body you could recognize. It was all one wound.

"Can you dare, nymph, to compare your disaster to ours? I also saw the lightless realms and bathed my mangled body in the Phlegethon's wave, and my life wouldn't have been restored except by the powerful medicine of Apollo's son. When I'd recovered it by Paeon's help and powerful herbs, though Pluto resented it, then Cynthia threw dense clouds in front of me—so that by being present I wouldn't increase envy for this gift. And so that I'd be safe and could be seen without danger, she added age and left my face unrecognizable. For a long time she debated whether to give me Crete or Delos to hold. Leaving Delos and Crete behind, she placed me here. At the same time she ordered me to lay down my name that could remind me of horses. 'You who were Hippolytus,' she said, 'now be Virbius!' From then on I've inhabited this grove and, as one of the lesser gods, I lie hidden under my mistress's divine power and am counted among her retinue."

But Egeria's grief couldn't be lightened by the misfortunes of others. Lying at the base of the mountain, she melted into tears, until Phoebus's sister, moved by the piety of the grieving woman, turned her body into a cold spring and thinned her limbs into eternal waters.

The strange event struck the nymphs, and the son of the Amazon was as amazed as when the Tuscan farmer saw a fateful clod of earth in the middle of his fields move of its own accord, with no one stirring it, and then take on human shape and lose the form of earth and open its mouth, recently created, to future fates. The natives called him Tages, who first taught the Etruscan race to open up future events. Or as when Romulus once suddenly saw his spear, which clung to the Palatine hills, put forth leaves—it stood by a new root, not driven in by iron, and now was not a weapon but a supple branch's tree, offering unexpected shade to the amazed.

Or as when Cipus saw his own horns in the river's water—for he saw them—and thinking the reflection was lying, he often brought his fingers to his forehead and touched what he saw, and now, no longer blaming his eyes, he stopped. As victor he was returning from a conquered enemy. Raising his eyes and arms together to the sky, he said: "Whatever, gods, this portent predicts—if it's joyful, may it be joyful for my homeland and the Roman people. If it's threatening, let it be for me!"

And from the green turf he appeased the grassy altars with fragrant fires, gave wine in bowls, and from the slaughtered sheep consulted the trembling guts to see what they meant. As soon as the haruspex of the Etruscan race examined them, he saw great undertakings in them indeed, though not clearly manifested. But when he raised his keen gaze from the animal's guts to Cipus's horns, he said: "Hail, O king! For to you, to you and your horns, Cipus, this place and the Latin citadels will submit. Only break delays and hurry to enter the open gates! So the fates command. For once you're received in the city, you'll be king and hold the scepter with lasting security."

He stepped back and turned his grim face away from the city's walls. "Far off, ah, far off may the gods drive all such things!" he said. "Much more justly will I spend my life in exile than have the Capitol see me as king." He spoke, and immediately summoned the people and the solemn senate. But first he covered his horns with peaceful laurel, stood on a mound made by his brave soldiers, and after praying to the ancient gods in the customary way, said: "There's one man here who, unless you drive him from the city, will be king. I'll tell you who he is by a sign, not by name. He bears horns on his forehead! The seer indicates to you that if he enters Rome, he'll give you slavish laws. He could have burst through the open gates, but we stood in his way, though no one is more closely connected to me than he is. Keep this man from the city, citizens, or if he deserves it, bind him with heavy chains, or end your fear with the death of the fated tyrant!"

The kind of murmuring the people made was like the sounds pine forests make when the fierce east wind hisses, or the kind ocean waves make if someone hears them from far off. But through the confused words of the roaring crowd, one voice stands out: "Who is he?" They looked at foreheads and sought the predicted horns.

Cipus spoke to them again: "You have the one you're asking for," he said, and though the people tried to prevent it, he removed the crown from his head and revealed his forehead marked with the twin horns. Everyone lowered their eyes and gave a groan. And that head, famous for its merits—who could believe it?—they saw unwillingly. Nor did they allow him to lack honor any longer—they placed a festive crown on him.

But the leaders, since you're forbidden to enter the walls, gave you, Cipus, as much honored country land as you could encompass with a plow drawn by yoked oxen from sunrise to the end of light. And they carved horns with a marvelous likeness onto the bronze doorposts, destined to remain through long ages.

Now reveal, Muses—you divinities present to poets, for you know, and the vast stretch of time doesn't deceive you—how the island that the deep Tiber flows around was added to the sacred rites of Romulus's city.

Once a dreadful plague had corrupted the Latin air, and pale bodies were wasting with bloodless disease. Exhausted by funerals, when they saw that mortal efforts achieved nothing and the arts of healing could do nothing, they sought heavenly help. They traveled to Delphi, which holds the middle of the earth's ground, and to Phoebus's oracle, and begged him to be willing with his healthbringing prophecy to aid their wretched affairs and end the evils of such a great city.

Both the place and the laurels and the quivers that the god himself carries trembled together, and the prophetic seat gave this voice from the lowest shrine and stirred their frightened hearts: "What you seek here, Roman, you should have sought in a nearer place, and seek now in a nearer place. You don't need Apollo to lessen your grief—you need Apollo's son. Go with good omens and summon our offspring."

When the wise senate received the god's commands, they searched to learn what city the young god of Phoebus cultivated, and sent men with favorable winds to seek the shores of Epidaurus. As soon as the sent men touched that place with their curved ship, they approached the council of the Greek leaders and begged them to grant them the god who, present, would end the deaths of the Ausonian race. The oracles had said so clearly.

Opinion was divided and varied. Some thought help shouldn't be denied. Many advised keeping their own resource and not sending out their god or handing over their divine power. While they hesitated, late twilight had struck down the light, and earth's shadow had brought darkness to the world, when the healing god seemed to stand in a dream before your couch, Roman, but just as he usually is in his temple. He held a rustic staff in his left hand and stroked his long beard with his right, and sent out these words from his peaceful chest: "Lay aside your fears! I'll come and leave behind my statue. Only look carefully at this serpent that coils around my staff and notice it with your sight, so you can recognize it! I'll transform into it, but I'll be bigger and will seem as large as celestial bodies should be when they transform."

Immediately with the voice the god departed, and with the god sleep departed, and gentle daylight followed sleep's departure. The next dawn had put the starry fires to flight. Uncertain what to do, the leaders gathered at the god's elaborate temple and prayed that he indicate with celestial signs what dwelling he himself wished to inhabit. They'd barely finished when the god, in the form of a serpent with lofty crests, sent out warning hisses of gold and, by his arrival, shook the cult statue and the altars and the marble floor and the golden roof. He stood sublime in the middle of the temple, raised to mid-chest, and looked around with eyes flashing with fire. The terrified crowd panicked. The priest recognized the divine presence—his chaste hair was bound with a white ribbon—and said: "It's a god—a god it is! Be favorable in hearts and tongues, whoever's here! May you, most beautiful one, be seen favorably, and may you help the peoples who cultivate your rites!"

All who were present worshipped the god as ordered, and they all repeated the priest's words doubled back, and the Aeneadae showed their piety with both mind and voice. The god nodded to them and, with moving crests, gave sure pledges repeated three times, with tongue vibrating hissing. Then he glided down the gleaming steps and turned his head back as he was leaving, looked at the ancient altars, greeted his accustomed home and the temple he'd inhabited.

From there the huge serpent crept along the ground covered with strewn flowers, bent in coils, and headed through the middle of the city to the harbor protected by a curved dike. Here he stopped and seemed to dismiss his retinue with peaceful expression and the crowd of attendants from their duty. He placed his body in the Ausonian ship. It felt the weight of his divine presence, and the keel was pressed down by the god's heaviness. The Aeneadae rejoiced, slaughtered a bull on the shore, and released the cables of the garlanded, wreathed ship.

A light breeze had pushed the vessel. The god rose up high, pressed the curving stern with his imposed neck, and looked down at the sea-blue waters. Through the Ionian sea with gentle west winds, at the rising of the sixth day he reached Italy and passed Lacinia's temple famous for the goddess, and the Scylacean shores. He left Iapygia behind, avoided the Amphrisian rocks with left-side oars, passed steep Cocinthus on the right, made for Romethium and Caulon and Narycia, escaped the strait of Sicilian Pelorus and the home of King Hippotades and the bronze of Temese. He sought Leucosia and the rose gardens of warm Paestus.

From there he passed along Capri and the promontory of Minerva and the hills of Surrentum rich with vines, and the city of Hercules, Stabiae, and Parthenope created for leisure, and from there the temple of the Cumaean Sibyl. From here the warm springs, and Liternum rich in mastic trees, and the Volturnus dragging much sand under its stream, and Sinuessa crowded with snow-white doves, and the graves of Minturnae, and what his nursling buried, and the house of Antiphates, and Trachas surrounded by marshland, and Circean land, and the crowded shore of Antium.

When the sailors steered their sail-bearing ship here—for now the sea was rough—the god uncoiled his folds and, gliding through the many turns and great curves, entered the temple of his parent that touches the yellow shore. When the sea had been calmed, the god from Epidaurus left his father's altars. Having enjoyed the hospitality of the related divine power, he scraped the sandy shore with the rasping of his scales, slid along and leaned his head on the high stern's rudder, and rested there until he came to Castrum and the sacred halls of Lavinium and to the Tiber's mouth.

Here all the people in a crowd, both matrons and fathers, rushed out to meet him everywhere, and those women who guard your Trojan fires, Vesta, and greeted the god with joyful shouts. Wherever the swift ship was drawn through the opposing waves, incense sounded on altars made in order on both banks and perfumed the air with smoke, and the struck victim warmed the thrown knives.

And now the ship had entered Rome, the head of the world. The serpent raised himself, leaned his neck against the top of the mast, moved it, and looked around for a seat suitable for himself. The river divides into two equal parts—it's called the Island—and it stretches out equal arms from the middle land on both sides. Here Apollo's snake made his way from the Latin pine and, taking back his heavenly form, put an end to grief and came as a health-bringer to the city.

This god, however, came as a stranger to our temples. Caesar is a god in his own city. War and the toga marked him as supreme—not so much his wars completed with triumphs, and his domestic deeds accomplished, and his glory's swift culmination, as his own offspring transformed him into a new star, a comet. For there's no greater work among Caesar's acts than that he became this man's father.

Really—was it greater to have tamed the sea-surrounded Britons, to have driven victorious fleets through the seven-flowing waters of the papyrus-bearing Nile, to have added to the Roman people the rebellious Numidians and Juba of Cynips and Pontus swelling with Mithridates's names, and to have deserved many triumphs and celebrated some, than to have fathered so great a man? Gods, you've favored the human race abundantly by making him guardian of the world!

So that he wouldn't be born from mortal seed, that one had to be made a god. When the golden mother of Aeneas saw this, and also saw that grim death was being prepared for the high priest and that conspirators' arms were moving, she grew pale and said to whichever gods she met: "Look how vast a plot is being prepared against me, with what deceit they seek the head that alone remains to me from Dardanian Iulus! Will I alone always be tormented with just worries—now wounded by Tydeus's son's Calydonian spear, now confounded by Troy's badly defended walls? Will I see my son driven by long wanderings, tossed on the strait, entering the homes of the silent dead, waging war with Turnus—or, if I speak the truth, more with Juno? Why am I now recalling the old losses of my race? This fear doesn't let me remember earlier ones. Look, you can see wicked swords being sharpened! Prevent them, I pray, and repel the crime, and don't extinguish Vesta's flames by killing her priest!"

Venus, anxious, cast these words in vain throughout all heaven and moved the gods, who, though they can't break the iron decrees of the ancient sisters, still gave signs of coming grief that weren't uncertain. They say arms were heard clanging among dark clouds, and terrible trumpets and horns heard in the sky forewarned of the crime. The sun's sad face too offered lurid light to the troubled earth. Often torches seemed to burn among the middle of the stars. Often drops of blood fell from the clouds. The morning star was dark blue and spattered with black rust, and the moon's chariot was splashed with blood. The Stygian owl gave sad omens in a thousand places, ivory wept in a thousand places, and songs and threatening words were reported to have been heard in sacred groves.

No victim brings success, and the liver warns that great turmoil is approaching, and a severed head is found in the entrails. In the forum and around homes and temples of the gods, dogs are reported to have howled at night, and the shades of the silent dead to have wandered, and the city to have been shaken with tremors. But the warnings of the gods couldn't overcome the conspirators and conquer the approaching fates. Drawn swords were brought into the temple—for no place in the city pleased them for this crime and the dreadful murder except the senate house.

Then truly Cytherea beat her chest with both hands and tried to hide the son of Aeneas in a cloud, the way she'd earlier snatched Paris from hostile Atreus's son and the way Aeneas had fled Diomedes's swords. But the father spoke to her like this: "Alone, daughter, do you prepare to move insuperable fate? You may enter the home of the three sisters yourself—you'll see there the archive of events with massive construction, made of bronze and solid iron, which fears neither the crash of heaven nor the lightning's wrath nor any ruin, safe and eternal. You'll find there the fates of your race carved in everlasting adamant. I myself read them and noted them in my mind, and I'll report them so you won't still be ignorant of the future.

"This man, for whom you labor, Cytherea, has completed his time and finished the years he owed to earth. You and his son will make it so that he accesses heaven as a god and is worshipped in temples. His son, heir of the name, will alone bear the burden imposed and will have us as his strongest avenger in war for his murdered father. Under his leadership the conquered walls of besieged Mutina will seek peace. Pharsalia will feel him, Macedonian Philippi will be wet again with slaughter, and a great name will be defeated in the Sicilian waves. The Egyptian wife of a Roman general, trusting badly in the marriage torches, will fall, and she'll have threatened in vain that our Capitol would serve her Canopus!

"Why should I count for you the barbarian lands and peoples lying near both oceans? Whatever habitable land the earth sustains will be his! The sea too will serve him! When peace is given to the lands, he'll turn his mind to civil laws and, as the most just author, will issue laws and regulate customs by his example. Looking toward the age of future time and coming descendants, he'll order the son born from his sacred wife to carry simultaneously his name and his cares. And not until, as an old man, he's equaled his years with his merits, will he touch the heavenly seats and kindred stars.

"Meanwhile, from the murdered body, snatch this soul and make it a star, so that always the divine Julius may look down on our Capitol and the forum from his lofty temple!"

He'd barely spoken when nurturing Venus stood in the middle of the senate house, visible to no one. She snatched the recent soul from Caesar's body and didn't allow it to dissolve into air, but carried it among the heavenly stars. As she carried it, she felt it catch light and burst into flame, and she released it from her breast. It flies higher than the moon and, trailing a fiery tail in its vast orbit, gleams as a star—and seeing his son's good deeds, he confesses they're greater than his own and rejoices to be surpassed by him.

Though he forbids his own acts to be preferred to his father's, fame, free and answerable to no commands, unwilling, prefers him and rebels against him in this one thing alone. So great Atreus yields in honors to Agamemnon, so Aegeus to Theseus, so Peleus was conquered by Achilles. Finally, to use examples equal to them, so too Saturn is less than Jupiter. Jupiter controls the citadels of the sky and the realms of the triple universe—the earth is under Augustus. Each is both father and ruler.

I pray, you gods who accompanied Aeneas, to whom sword and fire yielded, you native gods, and Quirinus, father of the city, and Gradivus, father of unconquered Quirinus, and Vesta sacred among Caesar's household gods, and you, Phoebus, domestic with Caesarean Vesta, and you, Jupiter, who hold the lofty Tarpeian citadels, and whatever other gods it's right and pious for a prophet to call upon—may that day be slow and later than our age when Augustus, having left the world he governs, accesses heaven and absent favors those who pray!

Now I've completed a work that neither Jupiter's anger nor fire nor sword nor devouring old age will be able to destroy. When it wishes, let that day, which has power over nothing except this body, end the span of my uncertain life. Yet in my better part I'll be borne immortal above the lofty stars, and my name will be indelible. Wherever Roman power extends over conquered lands, I'll be read by the people's mouths, and through all the ages, if prophets' foretellings have any truth, I'll live in fame.