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 well set up, pretty 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?"
[Sidenote: Od. i, 17]

Claudius was delighted to find literary men up there, 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."
[Sidenote: Od. ix, 39]

But the next verse was more true, and no less Homeric:

"Thither come, I sacked a city, slew the people every one."

He would have taken in poor simple Hercules, but 6
that Our Lady of Malaria was there, who left her temple and came alone with
him: all the other gods he had left at Rome. Quoth she, "The fellow's tale
is nothing but lies. I have lived with him all these years, and I tell you,
he was born at Lyons. You behold a fellow-burgess of Marcus. [Footnote:
Reference unknown.] As I say, he was born at the sixteenth milestone from
Vienne, a native Gaul. So of course he took Rome, as a good Gaul ought to
do. I pledge you my word that in Lyons he was born, where Licinus
[Footnote: A Gallic slave, appointed by Augustus Procurator of Gallia
Lugudunensis, when he made himself notorious by his extortions. See Dion
Cass. liv, 21.] was king so many years. But you that have trudged over more
roads than