“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 centuries is explained by the continuation and progress of ignorance and misery, but that one of their magistrates whose mind is raised above the common level should share these popular illusions and should be frightened by the hideous demons that the inhabitants of that country painted on the walls of their tombs in the time of Porsena—­that is something which might sadden even a sage.  My Etruscan visitor repeated verses to me which he had composed in a new dialect, called by him the vulgar tongue, the sense of which I could not understand.  My ears were more surprised than charmed as I heard him repeat the same sound three or four times at regular intervals in his efforts to mark the rhythm.  That artifice did not seem ingenious to me; but it is not for the dead to judge of novelties.