V. [1] So during the reign of Faunus, which was about sixty years before Aeneas landed in Italy, Evander Arcas, who was the son of Mercury and the Nymph Carmenta, ¹³ arrived along with his mother. [2] Some have recorded for history that she was first called Nicostrate and later Garmenta, from "songs" (carmina), and that this was of course because she was extremely skilled in all letters and wise concerning the future, and was accustomed to singing about these things in songs, to such an extent that most prefer to think that it is not so much that she was named Carmenta from the songs she sang, but rather that the songs were named after her. [3] By her advice Evander crossed over to Italy, and because of her unique erudition and knowledge of letters they enveigled their way in a short time into a close friendship with Faunus. Evander was welcomed by him hospitably and kindly and was given a territory of land to cultivate, and no small one. He allocated this land to his comrades and built homes on the hill which was at that time called Pallanteum by him, from Pallas; we now call it the Palatine. There he dedicated a shrine to the god Pan, since he was a god local to Arcadia, as Virgil also attests when he says

Pan, god of Arcadia deceived you and caught you, Moon ¹⁴

and similarly:

Even Pan, if he should compete with me with Arcadia as the judge,
even Pan with Arcadia as judge would admit ... ¹⁵

[4] And so Evander was the first of all to teach the Italians to read and write with an alphabet which was partly what he had himself learnt previously. The same man also showed them the agricultural products first developed in Greece and the practice of sowing, and was the first in Italy to teach people to yoke oxen for the purpose of cultivating the earth.