(_A gust of frosty wind carries them off. Anthony turns his eyes another way. And he perceives--outlined in black against a red background--certain strange personages, with chinbands and gauntlets, who throw balls at one another, leap over each other's heads, make grimaces, dance a frenzied dance._)
HILARION. "Those are the divinities of Etruria, the innumerable Æsars.
"There is Tages, by whom augury was invented. With one hand he seeks to augment the divisions of the sky; with the other he supports himself upon the earth: let him sink therein!
"Nortia gazes at the wall into which she drave nails to mark the number of the passing years. Its whole surface is now covered; and the period is accomplished.
"Like two travellers overtaken by a storm, Kastur and Pulutuk, trembling, seek to shelter themselves beneath the same mantle."
(_But with a mighty noise of wings, all the Victories of the Capitol pass through the air,--hiding their faces with their hands, dropping the trophies hanging upon their arms._
_Janus,--lord of crepuscules,--flees upon a black ram; and one of his two faces is already putrified; the other slumbers with fatigue._
_Summanus, the headless god of the dark heavens, presses against his heart an odd cake shaped like a wheel._
_Vesta, beneath a ruined cupola, tries to relight her extinguished lamp._
_Bellona gashes her cheeks,--without being able to make that blood flow by which her devotees were purified._)
(_And he shows him in a grove of bean-trees,_ A WOMAN, _naked.... .........and a black man, holding in each hand a torch._[8])
"It is the goddess of Aricia, with the demon Virbius. Her sacerdote, the King of the grove, had to be an assassin;[9] and the fugitive slaves, the despoilers of corpses, the brigands of the Via Salaria, the cripples of the Pons Sublicius, all the human vermin of the Suburra worshipped no deities so fervently.
"In the time of Marcus Antonius the patrician women preferred Libitina."
(_And he shows him under the shadow of cypresses and rose-trees_, ANOTHER WOMAN, _clad in gauze. Around her lie spades, litters, black hangings, all the paraphernalia of funerals. She smiles. Her diamonds shine afar off through spiders' webs. The Larvæ, like skeletons, show their bones through the branches; and the Lemures, who are phantoms, extend their bat-like wings._