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 that.

But again, if the seven kings had been just that and nothing more, I cannot see why H. P. Blavatsky should have laid such stress on the essential truth of their stories.  She is particular, too, about the Arthurian legend:—­saying that it is at once symbolic and actually historical,—­which latter, as concerns the sixth-century Arthur, it is not and she would not have considered it to be:  no Briton prince of that time went conquering through Europe.  So there must be some further value to the tales of the Roman kings; else why are they so much better than the Republican annals?  Why?—­unless all history except the invented kind or the distorted-by-pride-or-politics kind is symbolic; and unless we could read in these stories the record, not merely of some pre-Etruscan pralayic centuries, but of great ages of the past and of the natural unfoldment of the Human Spirit in history through long millenniums?  Evolution is upon a pattern; understand the drift of any given thousand years in such a way that you could reduce it to a symbol, and probably you have the key to all the past.