[5] What happened afterward on earth
it is superfluous to describe. For you know very well, and there is no danger
that things which the universal joy had impressed upon the memory will slip
from it; no one forgets his own good fortune. Listen to what happened in
heaven: it is on the authority of the narrator. The news was brought to Jupiter
that somebody had come, a rather tall man, quite gray-headed;
that he was threatening something or other, for he kept shaking his head; and
that he limped with his right foot. The messenger said he had asked of what
nation he was, but his answer was mumbled in some kind of an incoherent noise;
he didn’t recognize the man’s language, but he wasn’t either Greek or Roman or
of any known race. Then Jupiter told Hercules, who had travelled all over the
world and was supposed to be acquainted with all the nations, to go and find
out what sort of a man it was. Hercules at the first sight was a good deal
disturbed, even though he was one who didn’t fear any sort of monsters. When he
beheld the aspect of this unknown specimen, its extraordinary gait, its voice
belonging to no earthly creature but more like that of the monsters of the
deep, hoarse and inarticulate, he thought that a thirteenth labor
had come to him. When he looked more carefully, however, it appeared to be a
man. He approached him and thus spoke, as was easiest for a Greek chap:
Who and whence art thou, and where are thy city and parents?
Claudius was delighted to find literary people there, hoping there would be some
place for his histories. So he, too, in a Homeric verse, indicating himself to
be Caesar, said:
Hence from Ilium
the winds have among the Cicones cast me.
But the following verse would have been truer, and equally Homeric:
There their city I wasted; the people I slaughtered.
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