[
5]
What happened next on earth it is mere waste of time
to tell, for you know it all well enough, and there is no fear of your ever
forgetting the impression which that public rejoicing made on your memory. No one
forgets his own happiness. What happened in heaven you shall hear: for proof please
apply to my informant. Word comes to Jupiter that a stranger had arrived, a man of
fair height and hair well sprinkled with grey; he seemed to be threatening
something, for he wagged his head ceaselessly; he dragged the right foot. They asked
him what nation he was of; he answered something in a confused mumbling voice: his
language they did not understand. He was no Greek and no Roman, nor of any known
race. On this Jupiter bids Hercules go and find out what country he comes from; you
see Hercules had travelled over the whole world, and might be expected to know all
the nations in it. But Hercules, the first glimpse he got, was really much taken
aback, although not all the monsters in the world could frighten him; when he saw
this new kind of object, with its extraordinary gait, and the voice of no
terrestrial beast, but such as you might hear in the leviathans of the deep, hoarse
and inarticulate, he thought his thirteenth labour had come upon him. When he looked
closer, the thing seemed to be a kind of man. Up he goes, then, and says what your
Greek finds readiest to his tongue:
“Who art thou, and what thy people? Who thy parents,
where thy home?”
[p. 383]
Claudius was delighted to find literary men in that place, and began to hope there
might be some corner for his own historical works. So he caps him with another
Homeric verse, explaining that he was Caesar:
“Breezes wafted me from Ilion unto the Ciconian
land.”
But the next verse was more true, and no less Homeric:
“Thither come, I sacked a city, slew the people every one.”
